The Fifth American War
July 18, 2017 11:05 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning.

The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal, collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger fundamental and growing divide between Americans that is reaching a dangerous climax.

On four prior occasions in American history the country nearly split apart, as seemingly irreconcilable cultural, economic, political, social, geographical, and demographic fault lines opened a path to hatred and violence.

During the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1830s, factions nearly ripped the country apart over whether the East Coast Founders’ establishment of a half-century would relinquish its monopoly of political power to reflect the new demographic realties of an expanding frontier — and its populist champions often deemed unfit for self-governance. For the most part, the Jacksonians won.

Three decades later the nation divided over slavery, prompting the most lethal war in American history to end it and force the defeated Confederate southern states back into the Union.

The Great Depression, and the establishment’s inept responses to it, left a quarter of the country unemployed for nearly a decade — hungry and desperate to expand government even if it entailed curtailing liberty in a way never envisioned by the Founders. The result was eventually the redefinition of freedom as the right of the individual to have his daily needs guaranteed by the state.

In the 1960s, the hippie movement — fueled by furor over the Vietnam War, civil-rights protests, and environmental activism — turned holistic in a fashion rarely seen before. A quarter of the country went “hip,” grooming, dressing, talking, and acting in a way that reflected their disdain for the silent majority of “straight” or “irrelevant” traditional America. The hipsters lost the battle (most eventually cut their hair and outgrew their paisley tops to join the rat race) but won the war — as the universities, media, foundations, Hollywood, arts, and entertainment now echo the values of 1969 rather than those that preceded it.

Now we are engaged in yet a fifth revolutionary divide, similar to, but often unlike, prior upheavals. The consequences of globalization, the growth of the deep state, changing demographics, open borders, the rise of a geographic apartheid between blue and red states, and the institutionalization of a permanent coastal political and culture elite — and the reaction to all that — are tearing apart the country.

Despite its 21st-century veneer, the nature of the divide is often over ancient questions of politics and society.

The Deep State
Technological advances, the entrance of a billion Chinese into the global work force, and the huge growth in the administrative entitlement state have redefined material want. The poor today have access to appurtenances undreamed of just five decades ago by the upper middle classes: one or two dependable cars, big-screen televisions, designer sneakers and jeans, and an array of appliances from air conditioning to microwave ovens. The rub is not that a Kia has no stereo system but that it does not have the same model that’s in the rich man’s Lexus. Inequality does not mean starvation: Obesity is now a national epidemic among the nation’s poor; one in four Californians admitted for any reason to a hospital is found to suffer from diabetes or similar high-blood-sugar maladies due largely to an unhealthy diet and lifestyle choices.

In political terms, the conflict hinges on whether the powers of entrenched government will be used to ensure a rough equality of result — at the expense of personal liberty and free will. The old argument that a wealthy entrepreneurial class, if left free of burdensome and unnecessary government restrictions to create wealth, will enrich all Americans, is now largely discredited. Or rather it is stranger than that. The hyper wealthy — a Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Warren Buffett — by brilliant marketing and opportunistic politics are mostly immune from government audit, and from robber-baron and antitrust backlash. Instead, redistributive ire is aimed at the upper middle class, which lacks the influence and romance of the extremely wealthy and is shrinking because of higher taxes, ever-increasing regulations, and globalized trade.
It does not matter that the ossified European social model does not work and leads to collective decline in the standard of living. The world knows that from seeing the implosion of Venezuela and Cuba, or the gradual decline of the EU and the wreckage of its Mediterranean members, or the plight of blue states such as Illinois and California. Instead, it is the near-religious idea of egalitarianism that counts; on the global stage, it has all but won the war against liberty. We are all creatures of the Animal Farm barnyard now.

Indeed, if today’s student actually read Orwell’s short allegorical novel (perhaps unlikely because it was written by a white male heterosexual), he would miss the message and instead probably approve of the various machinations of the zealot pig Napoleon to do whatever he deemed necessary to end the old regime, even if it meant re-creating it under a new correct veneer.

The conservative effort to roll back the entitlement, bureaucratic, and redistributionist state has so far mostly failed. That today, coming off sequestration, we are on target to run up a $700 billion annual deficit, on top of a $20 trillion national debt, goes largely unnoticed. Eighteen trillion dollars in national debt later, Ronald Reagan’s idea of cutting taxes to “starve the beast’ of federal spending has been superseded by “gorge the beast” to ensure that taxes rise on the upper classes. To the degree that there is a residual war over entitlements, it is not over cutting back such unsustainable programs, but instead about modestly pruning the level of annual increases.

The government necessary to ensure such continued state borrowing and spending is now nearly autonomous and transcends politics — and is eager to use its formidable powers against any who threaten it.

Identity Politics
On a second front, there is a veritable civil war over race, ethnicity, gender, and identity. Massive immigration, the rise of opportunistic identity politics, and a new tribalism have replaced the old melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage with salad-bowl separatism. The only obstacle to the tribal state is that there may soon be too many victims with too many claims on too few oppressors.

There are too many incentives — from political spoils and university admissions, to government employment and popular cultural acceptance — to identify with one’s tribe rather than simply as an American.

The problems with such tribal fissuring are threefold. One, the rhetorical disdain for traditional majority culture and values operates in a landscape in which the critic adopts the tropes and lifestyles of all that he demonizes. From what traditions do the Claremont or Berkeley students believe their rights of protest derive? Where do they get their expectations of clean campus water or capital to drop out of the economy for four years of college? Was the technology behind the iPhone a result of a patriarchal, nativist, male culture — and does that therefore make the device tainted and unsuitable for use?

Second, if red-state, traditional America is constantly assaulted with various charges of –isms and —ologies, why would any foreigner wish to enter the United States, or upon entering live in such wretched places as red-state Arizona, Texas, Florida, or Utah? Is schizophrenia thus required: Concretely use and enjoy the legacies of a demonized culture while abstractly damning them?

Third, when tribalism supersedes the individual, then all criteria of merit, character, and ethics recede into identity: Race, gender, and ethnicity replace merit and we begin to have black NASA engineers, white nuclear-plant operators, or brown jet pilots rather than missiles, power, and flights that are overseen and operated by the most skilled among us. When a society operates on a tribal basis — we see it often in Africa and the Middle East — everything from tap water to IVs are a luxury.

In short, will America remain a multiracial nation united in one culture in which superficial physical appearance becomes largely irrelevant (and indeed one’s racial DNA pedigree soon becomes almost undefinable), or will it go the tribal route that ultimately leads to something like the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq — or Evergreen State, Ferguson, and Middlebury?

Finally, there is a growing rejection of the founding principles of the United States, its traditional Christian-based values, and the old idea of American exceptionalism. Federalism and the idea of a republic, after all, do not necessarily lead to radical egalitarianism or a society of absolute equals. Yet the modern progressive mind is wedded to two principles: that 51 percent of the population at any given moment should have the final say in governance only if it reflects correct progressive principles; and if the population is “fooled” and votes incorrectly, then an elite in government, the courts, and the media will intervene to set in place what hoi polloi should have done to properly advance the correct agendas.

In practical terms, will universities still teach the inductive method and fact-based knowledge, or deductive social activism? Will our past be seen as noble and at times tragic, or melodramatically as exploitive? And will progressives abide by occasional political setbacks in elections, the courts, and popular referenda, or seek to subvert those institutions as unacceptable impediments to their radically egalitarian agendas?

So who is winning this fifth American conflict, and why?

Progressivism.
It has an insidious appeal to human nature, offering contexts and arguments for dependency — which is defined as the consequence of some sort of prior unethical exploitation (rather than chance, bad luck, or personal pathology, perhaps in addition to exploitation) and therefore deserving of proper recompense. Progressivism promises a transcendence over nature’s limitations through superior education, proper training, and correct reasoning, as if poverty, illness, and inequality were not innate to human nature but results of selfishness and ignorance and so rather easily remedied. It confuses technological progress with a credo that human nature itself evolves in predictably progressive ways, thereby supposedly making obsolete institutions and protocols (from the Constitution itself to ancient ideas such as deterrence) that were once time-honored.

Virtue-signaling among elites who are critical of the very protocols that led to their own success serves as a psychological mechanism to alleviate guilt about privilege. And when an elite deprecates its own culture, the ripple effects widen upon reaching the masses. The combination of market capitalism and personal freedom can enervate a population, misleading people into thinking that their bounty is unending and natural, and giving them the latitude for cynicism, skepticism, and nihilism about the sources of their privilege. In the West, a narcissism follows that oddly manifests itself in thinking that human sins are almost exclusively Westerners’ own.

These age-old observations often led to depressions among Western philosophers who grasped the Western paradox that the success of market capitalism and constitutional government might undermine the ancient virtues essential to their continuance.

In this latest arena of civil dissent, Donald Trump, the renegade liberal and most unlikely traditionalist, squares off against the elite that despises his very being not only for reasons of class and culture, but mostly for attempting to restore a traditional regime of citizenship, individualism, assimilation, territorial sovereignty, recognized borders, strong defense, deterrence abroad, and free-market capitalism.

#3 offers a section for a complete reorganization of the Federal Government and a section, with underlying reasons as to why & how, on a new constitution. It also, for those recalcitrants opposed to a new constitution but willing to amend the current one, a section of amendments and even one of proposed legislation.]

Butch got upset with a recent segment of Tucker Carlson that showed a blatantly legislating federal judge. My immediate response didn’t completely satisfy him. Below are Article III and part of Article II plus the reasoning behind them which are in

§3.01 The Judicial Power of these United States, shall be in a Federal System of trial and appellate courts with District Courts, Circuit Courts of Appeals, and one Supreme Court of Appeals, with jurisdictions as follows:
§3.01.01 District Courts shall be trial courts
§3.01.01a District Courts shall be apportioned among the states regardless of state boundaries
§3.01.01b Their jurisdictional borders shall be identical to the geographic borders of the contiguous congressional districts assigned to them by The Congress
§3.01.01b(i) No District Court may have fewer than one congressional district nor more than seven (7) congressional districts within its purview
§3.01.01c In criminal cases, the jury shall consist of no fewer than eleven (11) voting members and no more than twenty-one (21) voting members
§3.01.01c(i) a guilty verdict may be brought in by eighty percent (80%) of the voting members rounded down
§3.01.01c(ii) a death penalty verdict may be brought in by ninety percent (90%) of the voting members rounded down
§3.01.01d In civil cases, the jury shall consist of no fewer than seven (7) voting members and no more than fifteen (15) voting members
§3.01.01d(i) a liability verdict may be brought in by sixty-five percent (65%) of the voting members rounded down
§3.01.01d(ii) a punitive damages award may be brought in by eighty percent (80%) of the voting members rounded down
§3.01.01e There shall be no more than three times (3X) the number of voting members of alternates, and no less than two (2) alternates on every jury
§3.01.01f In the event of a deadlocked or tied jury, or the minimum number of jurors be passed, the judge shall seal the record and the Circuit Court of Appeals for his district shall immediately certify the record for appeal and decision
§3.01.01f(i) In addition to reviewing the record for legal errors, this Circuit Court of Appeal shall also render the verdict including all damages, real, compensatory, and punitive or in a criminal case, set the penalty including death
§3.01.02 There shall be several Circuit Courts of Appeals placed over the District Courts by The Congress
§3.01.02a Upon appropriate appeal made, the Circuit Court shall review the record for all errors of law and fact
§3.01.02b There shall be a separate Federal Court of Distinctive Appeal, which shall be responsible for all appeals from administrative and military courts
§3.01.02b(i) The Federal Court of Distinctive Appeal shall be located at the capitol but may create and order special magistrates to any locale for fact finding, but never decision making
§3.01.03 There shall be one Supreme Court of Appeal over all the Circuit Courts of Appeal
§3.01.03a Upon appropriate appeal made, the Supreme Court shall review the records and decisions of the lower courts for errors of law and fact
§3.01.03b The Supreme Court shall be responsible for resolving disputes between the circuits
§3.01.03b(i) It shall resolve disputes between the circuits as soon as they occur and certify the records no later than sixty (60) days from the rendering of the contrary decision
§3.01.03b(ii) All circuit disputes shall be resolved during the term in which they are certified, the court staying in session until its work is completed
§3.02 The Judicial Power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made under their authority; to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers, consuls and civil servants when performing within the scope of their employment; to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; and to appellate controversies between two or more states, and between a state, or citizens thereto, and foreign states, citizens or subjects
§3.02.01 All Supreme Court decisions interpreting statutes or this Constitution of these United States, shall be, on the day rendered, forwarded to the Congress for complete acceptance, partial acceptance and remand, rejection and remand, or rejection and direction pursuant to §1.08.01a
§3.03 Eligibility requirements for the Federal Bar
§3.03.01 All Judges, Justices and U.S. Attorneys must meet the same eligibility requirements as those for president
§3.03.02 All private counselors and advisors, appearing in that capacity in Federal Court, must meet the same eligibility requirements as those for members of congress
§3.04 Representation of parties
§3.04.01 Only U.S. Attorneys shall be members of the Federal Bar
§3.04.02 All causes, criminal, civil, administrative, or other, will be assigned to a U.S. Attorney for prosecution, and to a second U.S. Attorney for defense
§3.04.03 Any and all parties to a Federal Action may, at his own non-reimbursable expense, hire a licensed member of any bar as a counselor to assist the U.S. Attorney assigned to represent him
§3.04.03a The Court, at its discretion or upon motion of a party, may, but is not required to, and it shall be reviewable on appeal, order more than one U.S. Attorney to represent a party in a Federal Action
§3.05 Everyone protected by this constitution has access to this court provided this court has subject matter jurisdiction
§3.05.01 Every petitioner shall submit his claim to the district court in which he lives
§3.05.01a the petition shall be reviewed by two U.S. Attorneys and one judge for appropriateness
§3.05.01a(i) Appropriateness shall include a decision on jurisdiction, both subject matter and personal
§3.05.01a(ii) Appropriateness shall include a decision on frivolity
§3.05.01a(iii) If the suit be found inappropriate, it will be returned with instructions on where and how to properly file it
§3.05.01a(iv) If the suit be found inappropriate for frivolity, the petitioner shall be charged the full expense of filing and assessment
§3.05.02 If the claim be appropriate, the court will prepare the petition for filing in accordance with the Rules of Procedure and assign it to the appropriate District Court wherever that shall be
§3.05.02a The appropriate District Court shall take charge of the suit, file it, assign a court, a plaintiff’s attorney and a defense attorney from its available pool of U.S. Attorneys, and perform all other necessary functions for the just and expeditious resolution of the claim
§3.06 Juries
§3.06.01 Every Bona Fide Corporeal Federal Citizen is subject to jury duty without recourse, except:
§3.06.01a Those actually in hospital
§3.06.01b Those adjudged mentally or physically incompetent by both a doctor of competent jurisdiction and a sitting Federal Court or under the age of eighteen (18) years
§3.06.01c Military or Civil Servants serving overseas or whose duties are of such paramount necessity to the public defense or health that to require their attendance endangers the public welfare
§3.06.01c(i) In such cases jury duty is postponed, not exempted
§3.06.01d Those scheduled to have life saving surgery during the time estimated for trial
§3.06.01d(i) In such cases jury duty is postponed, not exempted
§3.06.01e The President of the United States; The Speaker of The House; and, The Counter-Speaker of The House
§3.06.02 Jurors shall be compensated for their service by bringing the prior year’s 1040-IRA form and an hourly compensation will then be ascertained; compensation will then be at the hourly rate for the first forty (40) hours per week with the next twenty (20) hours at one hundred and fifty percent (150%) for the next twenty hours in that week and at two hundred and twenty five percent (225%) for each weekly hour past sixty (60)
§3.06.02a The court shall provide the second meal for any day where the juror’s time exceeds eight (8) hours
§3.06.02b Jurors shall supply the court with a statement of benefits from their employer or other provider of same and the court shall directly reimburse the provider the cost of such benefits for the duration of jury duty
§3.06.03 There shall be no peremptory challenges
§3.06.04 No potential juror shall be dismissed for any reason other than cause shown and cause shown is reviewable by the appellate court
§3.06.05 Avoidance of jury duty, or the filing of false information to avoid jury duty, is a felony
§3.07 Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, or giving them aid and comfort, or in supporting them financially or materially
§3.07.01 No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court
§3.07.02 The penalty for treason is death without stay or pardon
§3.07.03 No attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted
§3.08 No Federal Court at any time nor in any manner may grant a criminal greater rights or privileges than has a bona fide corporeal citizen of these United States of America
§3.09 Federal Judges and Attorneys shall have, once appointed, tenure for life or voluntary retirement, excepting that:
§3.09.01 §1.03.05 applies
§3.09.02 The President or the House may remove any judge or attorney for medical or psychological reasons, proven in a court of competent jurisdiction, including but not limited to, a finding of drug or alcohol dependence or abuse
§3.09.03 A judge or attorney once dismissed, may never be reinstated

§3.01 & §3.02

What appear to be overwhelming changes from the 1787 Constitution are actually what was originally intended in the 1787 Constitution, by both the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, were reiterated in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, and from time to time by various presidents and governmental watchdog groups, each having recommended one or all of these things. Each time that one or more of these have been suggested, the United States Supreme Court has made its next decision on whatever subject raised everyone’s ire, a slightly retrograde decision which never recovers a tenth of the ground lost but which placates all of the court watchers but has continually moved us into the realm of socialism and of judicial legislation. The quick proof is to look at almost any controversial opinion made by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and where the U.S. Supreme Court has ultimately ended up. Another quick proof is to look at how easily the avowed socialist Ruth Bader-Ginsberg and Sotomayer were confirmed and to how impossible it has been to get Moderate Republicans confirmed, never mind actually getting a Republican or a Conservative confirmed. The best quick proof has been the death penalty.
When the founders put in the clause regarding cruel and unusual punishment, they were specifically talking about stocks, branding, maiming, dunking, drawing & quartering, castration, forced bankruptcy then moving the debtor and his whole family into debtors prison where he and they became day-laborers-slaves and died still in debt, as it was structured to be impossible to work the debt off, the debt being then inherited by his heirs.
Jefferson knew about this personally as he was debt free until he married. When his father-in-law died and they inherited her proportional share of his estate, Jefferson found himself so in debt that he never recovered. He himself died selling family/slave members west and a bankrupt. The state of Virginia allowed a lottery for the purpose of relieving his debt around 1823 but still couldn’t raise enough money to satisfy his creditors. (Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, died on July 4th, 1826 coincidentally within hours of John Adams, 2nd President of the United States, who died debt free.)
So, here we have a structure that places justice back into the hands of the citizenry. Currently, you do not have the absolute right to a jury trial in a civil case. You now have to ask and the court may deny your request. Also, the structure of the courts is codified. The Federal Circuit Court is now the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It just so happened to evolve this way because when you sue the federal government, you must file in D.C., hence, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals just so happened to get the bulk of the administrative cases. This hasn’t affected how the individual circuits have interpreted the Code of Federal Regulations, the C.F.R.’s which are the regulations formulated by the various government agencies for the implementation of their powers. One need only check on what the 9th Circuit has allowed or what the EPA and NLRB have gotten away with.
A quick proof is the judicial extension of the Social Security Act by the 9th Circuit back in the 1970’s.
The SSA was for people who put into the funds. If you didn’t contribute to the funds or be the widow or minor child of someone who had contributed into the SSA trust funds, you weren’t eligible to receive any Social Security checks of any kind. With the influx of Vietnamese refugees, some claiming post-traumatic stress from watching their villages, farms, relatives or jungles being bombed into the stone age by the United States Air Force, all on their own testimony without corroboration, and Administrative Law Judges (ALJ’s) denying these claims, when appealed through the District Courts to the Circuit Court, the 9th Circuit decided to extend to these poor people one hundred percent (100%) vesting in the Social Security Plan. You should research this yourself to make certain that this is the correct order of things. It just may be that Congress violated the constitution and the original SSA and the 9th Circuit was merely following the will of the people as placed into law by the elected representatives of the people. Regardless … .
Another quick proof is the death penalty issue. In every poll and at every election, the citizenry are in favor of the death penalty with an affirmative vote of at least 70%. Yet the courts, both state and federal, keep saying that killing a murderer is cruel because it inflicts a certain amount of pain on him. Let us consider the absurdity of this position.
First, it’s not up to the courts to decide this issue, it’s strictly legislative. Second, even if you’re an atheist, what’s the real difference between death by lethal injection and death from old age? Personally, death by lethal injection is much more humane than requiring someone live in Leavenworth Prison for thirty, forty, fifty or more years.
Technically, the bulk of this section shouldn’t even be in a constitution. Most of this is statutory in nature. Because the courts have become havens for the personal agendas of the judges, it’s necessary to spell it out for them and remove so much of their discretionary powers.
§3.03 through §3.05

Juries. Part of the problem with the lack of justice is the ability of the court to disallow citizens to participate on a jury on a whim, and that potential jurors can escape jury duty for any reason or no reason and without good cause shown. Actually, this, as certain other sections, shouldn’t be in a constitution. This should be a statute. However, the phrase, “why would you want a jury of people too stupid to get out of jury duty,” is all too true.
Judges and attorneys do not want anyone educated to sit on a jury, nor do they want anyone who may view the facts dispassionately. They all want an easy resolution by either overwhelming the jury with so much crap that they take the easy way out or they appeal to their emotions to get huge jury awards. Quick proof: there is no substantial evidence as to what causes cerebral palsy. The Plaintiff’s bar has made themselves billions of dollars by appealing to the emotions of jurors. The widow of a man who used Vioxx for less than nine months and then died of heart failure, is certainly not entitled to $50,000,000 for the loss of his life’s earnings and consortium, much less a punitive award of $250,000,000 when the evidence so clearly shows that the patient must take Vioxx for over 24 months to have any serious side effects. A jury made up of people from the community, college graduates as well as high school drop-outs, men and women, probably would not have come to that decision.
When one looks to Europe, we see that in these kinds of cases, an economic assessment is made for the bereaved family and that’s what they receive, and, if the manufacturer is found to have been negligent, the corporate leaders are charged with manslaughter and do time if convicted. Here, we try to keep things on the economic plane, keeping in mind fair play, equity and justice, which the courts disallow.
By having juries defined and the community protected by these rules, and the pecuniary interests of the judges and attorneys completely removed from the litigation process, justice will become the norm and injustice an aberration.

§3.07 through 3.09

These are self explanatory. The section on not allowing criminals more rights that citizens is fairly well covered above. The penalties’ section simply removes the undesirables from staying on the bench.
More Reasoning
Another quick proof of the malignant intentional negligence of the court system, and one which is about to cost the taxpayer trillions of dollars, is the allowance into the court system of a suit for reparations by people alleging to be descended from slaves, here in the United States. This gross injustice is so rife with illegal and non-judicial forms that it must be commented on.
A quick historical background on slavery in the western hemisphere has been pointed out above. In addition, it’s necessary to point out that the people who profited from slavery include all those northern states who provided the ships and ports, and agents in Africa who bought the slaves originally and those that took Federal Dollars to improve roads and canals, those Federal Dollars being tax revenue from primarily southern states. However, just to point out the legalistic nonsense involved and allowed in this suit, read on:
First, in order to file the suit, you must be the one injured. No one in this country can claim to have had his labor stolen by the government. The United States Government has never owned slaves and, in fact, when Lincoln tried to avert the War of 1861 by asking congress to buy the slaves, he was told that the federal government wasn’t allowed to own slaves, even for the limited purpose of manumission. When Lincoln proposed to buy the slaves from the slave states that had stayed loyal, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, & Delaware, his purpose to prove that the war was being fought to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves, which was an unconstitutional purpose, he was told that the necessary and proper clause wasn’t broad enough to allow congress to spend the money that way and that the spending clause also prohibited this purchase. His decision to free the slaves through The Emancipation Proclamation was allowed only because it didn’t apply to the United States but to a foreign nation with which the United States was at war and because it was not a government action, but an action by the military applying only to an enemy state! So, nowhere in the 220 year history of the United States has the United States owned slaves. Plaintiff’s lack standing for this reason alone.
Second, you must be the damaged one. Reparations suits have been allowed by the courts where the plaintiffs have been Japanese-Americans wrongfully incarcerated during WW II and for Jews and others against Germany and Swiss Banks for the theft of goods and labor. There is also a suit being considered against Japan by WW II veterans who were used as forced labor to build roads, bridges and work in factories, where, again, only those living have been allowed in as parties, none of their descendants. In this suit, no one originally a slave is a plaintiff.
Third is the all-necessary parties rule. In order to provide justice, you must make all those liable parties to the suit. Generally, this is considered a class action suit. Now, let’s look at those actually liable in the reparations issue: First, those who took the original peoples into slavery, according to the actual facts and records, were 80% African Tribesmen who took other tribesmen into slavery, a practice that still goes on today. Not one African tribe or country is included as a defendant. Secondly, there were those who transported the slaves, primarily Boston and Providence shippers, none who’ve been made defendants.
In such a suit, all the plaintiffs must be included or given the chance to be included. Everyone has seen the ads in Reader’s Digest and TV Guide, where you need to file as a plaintiff in one of the asbestos suits, or breast implants, or Vioxx. The same joining of parties is necessary in this suit. Since this is a suit for reparations for some ancestor having been a slave, then just about everyone should be a plaintiff because somewhere in your history, and mine someone was a slave to somebody. Being Polish, several generations of my ancestors were enslaved as serfs by the Russians; a serf being worse off than a slave because a slave has value and a serf is only part of the land, like a tree or a rock. If this reparations suit were reasonable, then we’d all be plaintiffs and every institution, business and government would be a defendant. Simply as a matter of law, it’s a necessity to include all necessary parties. Not done here.
Further, in order to be just, only those who originally owned slaves can be assessed damages. My grandparents came to this country to get away from the war. I’m second generation. To the best of my knowledge, no one in my family has ever owned slaves, but in fact, have been Russian Serfs. I should be a plaintiff. On the side of defendants, in order to be just, a study would have to be made as to who was here before 1866 when slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment, as well as who is actually descended from an actual American slave owner. And, someone had better include those blacks descended from that 32% of slave owners who were black.
Next is the issue of Statute of Limitations. If these people who were not damaged by slavery are entitled to bring suit over one hundred and fifty years after the last occurrence, then everyone can bring suit against anyone and everyone for any reason at any time regardless of law or reason. The Statute of Limitation for a suit of stolen labor is less than ten years in Missouri. This means that any suit filed after 1876 should be dismissed for un-timeliness.
Next is the issue of Cause of Action. Is this really a suit for damages for discrimination or for forced labor? Forced labor is really a States’ issue and should not be in Federal Court for that reason alone. If this is a discrimination issue, then where are the Amer-Indians, Chinese and Caucasian descendants necessary for adjudication?
Damages must be for a sum certain or there must be some method of determining damages. In this suit there is no reasonable formula for computation of damages. In fact, there is no formulation for who should receive those damages if it becomes possible to ascertain them. Less than 60% of the blacks living in the United States today are descended from American slaves. How is the court supposed to determine who collects what.
Along with the issue of damages is mitigation of damages. How is the court going to count the monies spent by congress on welfare, affirmative action, EEO &c., or the monies given to charities or The National Negro College Fund, &c, by whites and others, against any spurious damages? Impossible.
Best yet, whom can they collect against? All the slave owners and their property are long gone. Under the 1787 Constitution, the court does not have the authority to order the Government to pay damages caused by private individuals, only congress can do that and only for a legitimate reason. Any order by the court to pay from tax revenue is unconstitutional on its face. The suit should have been dismissed as not in the jurisdiction of the court, but in fact a legislative issue. And Congress is forbidden to pass Bills of Attainder and Ex Post Facto laws. Meaning, you can’t post date a law back one minute, much less 160 years or more, just because you want to. And, the court has no jurisdiction in this matter.
Instead the people of the United States, over 95% who have no involvement in the issue, are staring at a lawsuit, or not because the mainstream media hasn’t reported this suit, are going to be out trillions of dollars.
One thing not mentioned above, is that the lawyers involved will make a fortune on this bogus suit. The court will award attorney’s fees to the lawyers. Article II removes the litigating federal attorneys from all temptation of financial gain through misapplication of law or procedure. Even in a case where the court feels that the suit needs more lawyers, in Kansas City alone, there are over 200 lawyers available for temporary work at $23.00 per hour, no benefits other than overtime, so additional lawyers, not U.S. Attorneys, are readily available at reasonable rates, as temps.
These changes are necessary for justice and to stop the millionaire jury lottery that our courts have become. Make a group of people not smart enough to get out of jury duty sympathetic, and regardless of law and fact, become an instant multi-millionaire with the lawyers getting up to 60% as their fee. (State of Missouri allows 60% to attorneys in contingent fee cases.)
Nope, these changes are not only necessary, they are righteous.

[From Article II, The Legislature:]

§1.08.01 The House shall have the following Standing Committees with the responsibilities as delineated therein, plus those others to be delegated and revocable to them by The People, and in The Senate revocable by The States:
§1.08.01a Judiciary
§1.08.01a(i) Within thirty (30) days of a decision by The Supreme Court on any Constitutional Issue, or Interpretation of a law passed by congress, this committee will recommend either the acceptance of the court’s interpretation in its entirety, acceptance of a part of the interpretation remanding the remainder for the court to reconsider, for which it will have no more than ten (10) days to submit a re-interpretation for this committee to reconsider, or reject the court’s interpretation in its entirety in which case the court will have ten (10) days to resubmit its decision; this committee shall have the privilege, not right, of suggesting to The Court a more appropriate decision
§1.08.01a(ii) When the committee has decided to accept the court’s interpretation in its entirety, it will then submit to The Congress the Court’s decision for its approval
§1.08.01a(iii) The Congress will then, as a committee of the whole, decide to accept or reject the Judiciary Committee’s Report. In the event of a rejection, The Congress shall have thirty (30) days to write and pass by a 60% majority of the Quorum of the entire Congress, a decision that will then be the final decision as to the interpretation of this Constitution or of the Federal law in question
§1.08.01a(iv) The Judiciary Committees shall recommend the appointment of all Federal Judges and Attorneys from the appropriate lists provided to them by The President to The Congress
§1.08.01a(iv)A Appointments must be made within thirty (30) days of a position becoming vacant
§1.08.01a(iv)B Appointments must be made from and only from the pre-existing list of candidates provided by The President, said lists further defined in Article II, The Executive
§1.08.01a(v) The Judiciary Committees will be responsible for recommending to The Congress for its approval all Rules of Civil Procedure, Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Rules of Evidence, keeping in mind the recommendations of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and also that of The Executive as submitted by The Attorney General of the United States, but neither shall they be bound by such recommendations
§1.08.01a(vi) The Judiciary Committees shall be responsible for the recommendation of Impeachment of Federal Judges and U.S. Attorneys, when called for by a Writ of Impeachment from either the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or by The Executive or by themselves, or by the Legislature of the State in which the Judge or Attorney is assigned
§1.08.01a(vi)A Said Writ shall clearly state the breach of this Constitution alleged, the evidence supporting the Writ, or, present the Conviction of Felony requiring said judge’s or attorney’s dismissal as required in Article III of this Constitution
§1.08.01a(vi)B If said Writ is presented by a state’s legislature, the Writ must have been voted approved by 75% of both houses of that legislature, 75% of the full legislature, not 75% of the quorum
§1.08.01a(vii) At the direction of The Congress shall provide all other oversight necessary to prevent the court from legislating

1.08 Required Committees and their responsibilities

Specific Committees designed to do certain things. The Founding Fathers, as noted in the preceding comment, had limitations on the franchise. They believed that certain issues, even those that were unpopular or messy, would be properly handled because congress would be made up of responsible people. Two Hundred and Twenty years have shown us otherwise. Just look at the number who routinely bounce checks. Look at the pork. Look at the current spitefulness & partisanship wrangling, over 9/11 and the Iraq Vote. Look to Obamacare and all of the waivers; and, if that’s not enough, go read Throw Them All Out, for the insider trading, legal for congress, illegal for you and me.
Look at the National Debt, or don’t. Whether you do or don’t, YOU owe over $100,000, as does each man, woman, and child who’s a citizen in this country. We’ve got this debt because members of the congress created by the 1787 constitution, are irresponsible and represent only special interest groups and most particularly not the middle-class taxpayer. (The current National Debt is over 16.75 Trillion Dollars – $16,750,000,000,000.00 now divide by 300,000,000 and that’s how much each individual owes, and really, who’s going to pay that money off? )
In recent history various congressional responsibilities have been ignored and the executive and judicial branches have stepped into the vacuum. Roe v Wade is only one public example of such. The Dred Scott Decision, for those who are actually familiar with it, is another. Almost every decision of John Marshall’s, starting with Marbury v Madison, has been a lurid and successful attempt at taking power away from the people. Reading from The Federalist it seems that the Founding Fathers would have approved. Reading from the works represented in The Anti-Federalist, The Massachusetts Plan, and those speeches in Congress from about 1820 through 1860, as well as the constitutional debates themselves (1787), it’s shown that the 1787 constitution became terminally ill with Marbury.
In both sets of essays and such works as Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government and Geo Washington Letters to Bushrod Washington and the various letters of such note-worthies as Senator/President Jefferson Davis, Senator Stephen Douglas, President Abraham Lincoln, President John Adams, President Thomas Jefferson, et al, congress is MEANT to supersede the Supreme Court and the Executive. Instead, for fear of offending some special interest group back home, much power has left the people by the ineptitude and cowardice of the national legislators.
By having specific duties and responsibilities spelt out, The Congress cannot but do its duty and fulfill its obligations to the nation. The questions of constitutionality of abortion would’ve been answered within six months; Spiro Agnew would’ve gone to jail a lot sooner; the National Debt would be a lot less; a $500,000,000 bridge to nowhere in Alaska wouldn’t exist; Cindy Sheehan and now Sandra Fluke, wouldn’t be in the news ad nauseum.
An historical aside is that before the Marshalistas got control of the Supreme Court, constitutional issues were put to the jury, not to a judge or appellate court with its own agenda.

How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps
May 9, 2017 12:27 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Counting the ways, and Comey is not among them.

Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.

Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.

In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.

The Pretexts
We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.

Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.

Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.

In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.

As far as the Russians, they are Russians — always seeking to throw wrenches into the gears of U.S. elections. The Republicans claimed that their firewalls kept the Russians out of RNC e-mail; John Podesta using “password” for his password invited them in. And, of course, no one forced Washington journalists to collude through e-mail with the Clinton campaign, and no one ordered Hillary to jerry-rig a home-brewed server. The Russian-collusion bogeyman was probably as effective a campaign prop for Clinton as the supposed Russian-inspired e-mail revelations were for Trump.

1. McMurphy Trumps Nurse Ratched
More likely, Clinton lost the key, Rust Belt states that swung the electoral vote to Trump for our five classic reasons.

Her personality, in far different ways, was as polarizing as Trump’s. But Trump was far better as a TV showman, given his long stint on reality TV. Hillary’s voice, facial expressions, and comportment were not winning. Even on the rare occasions that she told the truth, she seemed more insincere than Trump, even when he was spinning a yarn.

Trump’s image as a bad boy was less damaging than Hillary’s as a scold. Both are roughly the same age and, to the eye, not in the best of shape, but Trump displayed an almost animal energy while Clinton often appeared frail, worn, and on occasion ill on the stump. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the reader sympathizes with the pseudo-patient and con Randle McMurphy, who does everything haywire, rather than “Big Nurse” Mildred Ratched, who does everything by the book; the former was at least undeniably alive, the latter only ostensibly so.

2. Against Something Is Not For Something
Second, Hillary Clinton had no real sincere position on any issue other than a desire to stay in public office for nearly a quarter-century, and her willingness to extend the eight years of the Obama agenda — an agenda that had never achieved 2 percent economic growth and that saw record labor non-participation, a doubling of the national debt to $20 trillion, and a world in chaos abroad.

Once Obama got wise in January 2016 that he was the most popular when he was not seen or heard, he dropped out of sight and kept silent. Meanwhile, 17 Republicans along with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton hogged the national spotlight and tore one another apart. Through it all, Obama’s eight-year-long stream of dismal popularity ratings gradually improved. But his newfound transient popularity did not mean that most Americans liked Obama’s policies or judged them as successful.

The result was that Hillary played a losing 1968 Hubert Humphrey to Obama’s lame-duck Lyndon Johnson — she risked an occasionally meek nip on the administration’s ankles but was otherwise silent about her own positions to the extent they even existed. In a year when people wanted a change from the prior eight years, Clinton offered none. “I am a woman” and “Trump is a monster” were not serious campaign issues, but they sum up the totality of why Clinton wished Americans to vote for her. Most still did, but not in the key states where Obamism had wrought disaster.

3. Populists Bite Back
Third, voters had, once again, tired of Washington politics. The aura of 2016 was “drain the swamp” change. A septuagenarian socialist, who was not a Democrat, nonetheless almost won the Democratic primary on the theme that a Washington insider Bernie Sanders was at least not a Clintonian apparatchik mired in quid-pro quo beltway payola.

In a normal year, a sober and judicious Jeb Bush, or a proven competent governor such as Scott Walker, or a charismatic ascendant such as Marco Rubio would have won the Republican nomination.

But not in 2016, when voters wearied of sermons about their ethical shortcomings delivered by liberal and conservative grandees who were not subject to the consequences of their own ideologies — whether on trade, globalization, illegal immigration, health care, the budget, or foreign policy. Many voters saw Hillary, accurately, as the epitome of self-interested professional politics, leading always to personal enrichment. Trump’s supposed vulgarity and crudity only enhanced his image as a reckless (but nonetheless defiant) Samson determined to pull down the supporting pillars of the rotten Washington temple — even if the wreckage fell on himself, he’d ensure rubble on everyone else as well. Hillary was the EU; Trump was Brexit.

4. Super Bowl III: The Colts Upset the Jets
Fourth, arrogance, ignorance, and sloth are a fatal trifecta—sort of like the conditions that led the Baltimore Colts to be disastrously upset by the New York Jets in Super Bowl III. The Colts’ tried and true and careful Johnny Unitas proved no match for erratic and flamboyant Joe Namath.

Haughtiness, insularity, and laziness characterized the conduct of the Clinton campaign. Even a novice outsider could see that Obama’s successful electoral matrix — record minority turnout and bloc voting, coupled with the drop-off in turnout by a disengaged white working middle class (tired both of left-wing identity politics and Republican bluestocking elitism) — was not going to be transferrable to an off-putting 69-year-old, white multimillionaire.

Not only did Hillary Clinton lack Obama’s youthful vigor and mellifluousness; she also seemed at times geriatric, snarky, and screechy. The result was that she did not win the minority vote at the levels she needed. Further, she galvanized the supposedly ossified and irrelevant white working classes to finally come out and vote, in their own bloc fashion, against her. Obama had guaranteed her his downside but never delivered his upside.

Clinton’s only chance to make up for missing identity-politics voters by appealing to the working classes of the Midwest was to replay her 2008 Annie Oakley Democratic-primary role — by drinking boilermakers in Milwaukee, or bowling in Scranton, or reminiscing about shooting guns as young gal. But eight years ago, the Democratic party was still aw-shucks Bill Clinton’s. In 2016, it was captive to the identity-politics polarization so effectively deployed, in community-organizer style, by Barack Obama.

So instead Clinton doubled down on the tired theme that Rust Belt losers needed to shape up and get with the globalized progressive project and a demography-is-destiny new America. Obama had deprecated Pennsylvanians as has-beens clinging to their Bibles and guns; Hillary updated them, adding “half of Trump’s supporters” as irredeemables and deplorables. Miners were toxic losers who needed to learn how to build solar panels rather than mine coal. In contrast, Trump called them “our miners.”

She made her disdain concrete by never campaigning in Wisconsin and only sporadically visiting the Blue Wall states eastward to the Carolinas. And she was convinced that demography had doomed the white working classes and empowered Latinos and blacks in red states such as Arizona and Georgia. Clinton’s inept campaign aimed, then, not just at a win (which was attainable by nonstop populist barnstorming and message massaging in the Rust Belt) but, greedily, at a “mandate” that was impossible, given minority-vote falloff and Democratic estrangement from the working classes. Apparently, no one told the campaign that open borders were not a popular national issue, and that Democrats could not win Texas even with Latino bloc voting, and that they could do so in deep-blue California but without any electoral significance.

Clinton surrounded herself with Pajama Boy whizz kids who looked and sounded as if they were on vacation from DuPont Circle in D.C., or Manhattan’s Upper West Side (and who appeared as Stanley and Livingston explorers to the natives of southern Michigan or eastern Pennsylvania). Meanwhile, Trump advisers, such as Kelly Ann Conway and Steven Bannon, acted and talked like they had been around the proverbial American block.

Hillary had the money edge, all the establishment endorsements, a united Democratic party, and a captive toadyish media. Yet she still lost to an outspent Trump, who had never run for a single public office and whose own party and media elite damned him as much as they did his enemies. His victory will remain one of the most amazing campaign outcome in U.S. election history — especially in a postmodern electronic age in which “analytics” and “data” are supposed to make human capriciousness a relic of the past.

5. From Clinton Cash to Non-secure E-mail
In 2016, there was nothing comparable to the unpopular Iraq War or the frightening 2008 financial meltdown that had propelled Obama to the White House. But there was a succession of scandals — almost all Clinton’s — that confirmed the image that she was not just unethical, but predictably so.

Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash is underappreciated for its effect on the campaign. Through painstaking research, it tied together all the strands of Clinton nefariousness: the Clinton Foundation as an excuse to hire political flunkies and provide free jet travel; the quid pro quo State Department nods to those who hired Bill Clinton to speak; and corruption under Hillary Clinton, from cellphone concessions in Haiti to North American uranium sales to Russian interests.

Add to the Clinton sleaze Hillary’s unsecured server and communications of classified material, the creepy New York and Washington careerists who turned up in the Podesta archives, and the political rigging that warped the conduct of the Democratic National Committee.

The result was that Hillary could no longer play the role of the “good” Clinton who “put up” with her husband’s “good ole boy” sleaze. Her new image was that of an equal partner in crime — or perhaps even a godmother who used the capo Bill as muscle. In comparison, Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump taxes, and Trump ties were old-fashioned American hucksterism, but with one important difference: Trump’s excesses were a private person’s; Clinton’s were those of a public servant.

The correct exegesis for losing in 2016 should explain the Democratic strategy for winning in 2020: Run a vigorous, mellifluent, and sympathetic candidate; put forth new solutions to old problems; empathize with noncoastal America and camp out there, too; run a campaign as if it were in danger of losing rather than already past the finish line; and prune away Washington, D.C., hangers-on, with their acceptance of corruption as the new normal.

Or instead maybe Democrats can nominate another 69-year-old, multimillionaire female political insider who will run an identity-politics campaign on her gender, on the fact that she is not the monstrous Donald Trump — and on the premise that all the world, from the FBI to the Russians, are out to get her.

[One of many reasons that I like Dr. Hanson’s posts, is his adherence to practical history. One may take out all personal content, and then be able to use this, as so many of his columns, as a guide to “how to” do something. If we take his posts analyzing the 2016 election, remove the personality components, we have a book that explains both how to win an election and how to lose an election.

The same may be said of his columns on social issues. His analytical approach allows us to see how to run a government properly, or not, through is writings on the conditions in California.]

To paraphrase the Beatles: Well, you know, you’d better free your mind instead; you may want a revolution but ought to settle for some evolution.

It is an article of revealed religion among defense elites that “we live in a relentlessly changing and fiercely competitive world.” Those words were from former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, once a physicist and someone deeply imbued with the idea that technological change and competition were the elements propelling change, and that those who failed to “innovate” were doomed to defeat: “Today’s era of military competition is characterized by the additional variables of speed and agility, such that leading the race now frequently depends on who can out-innovate faster than everyone else, and even change the game.”

Such attitudes took root in the late Cold War, back when the Pentagon had a “director for defense research and engineering”—a powerful post separate from the actual weapons-buying bureaucracy—and invested substantial sums in the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency. These agencies were dominated by engineers, practical people whose goal was not science per say but to find ways to put new technologies into the hands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. But the combination of the Cold War’s end and the endless small wars of the post-9/11 years has inverted this traditional approach; the leaders of the Defense Department have been driven by the immediate need to respond to today’s enemies—all of them unpredicted—and have luxuriated in an extreme form of futurism—dreams that must inevitably go unfulfilled.

The failure to build and field in important numbers the weapons designs of the 1990s has all but deprived U.S. forces of the conventional-force superiority that is a premise of their strategy. The past failures to innovate incrementally have added up, even though the Russians and Chinese—and, increasingly, their Iranian partners in what Walter Russell Mead has dubbed the “Axis of Weevils”—have done little more than attained the level of lethality and sophistication reached by U.S. forces during Desert Storm. And since the Weevils are, for the moment, entirely engaged in moving into the vacuum created by American withdrawals rather than testing their strength directly, it is hard to know what level of tactical competence they have really derived from their belated modernization, but the balance of military power has undoubtedly shifted. National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster put the matter succinctly: “When we minimize our Army, we maximize the risk to our soldiers, the risk that in a crisis they will be forced to enter a fight too few in number and without the training and equipment they need to win.”

In such circumstances, broad programs of military “transformation”—Donald Rumsfeld’s dream or a “third offset,” and Ash Carter’s homage to former Defense Secretary William Perry and the creation of “stealth” aircraft—are not relevant. Photon torpedoes, warp drives, and cloaking devices remain in the realm of the starship Enterprise. Better the urgency of President John Kennedy, who vowed to put an American on the moon “in this decade,” than the spirit of Captain James Kirk. And in fact, there are fairly mature military technologies that meet the test of restoring the tactical advantages that U.S. troops once enjoyed.

Perhaps the most tantalizing near-term technologies are related to the substitution of intense amounts of electrical energy for the explosive power of gunpowder. This comprises a kind of catch-all category that subsumes several developments and could have—at least to leaders with an engineering mindset—multiple applications. Fielding electrical-energy-based weapons depends upon the ability to generate and to store immense amounts of power, and then release it either as a destructive force on its own or to propel a projectile at extremely high speeds. Stored electricity might prove to be the gunpowder of the future.

The Defense Department and the military services have been experimenting with these technologies for a decade and more. The Army and Navy have tested a number of “railgun” designs. Railguns are electromagnetic launchers with a parallel set of conductors—the “rails”—that accelerate a sliding armature by passing a very strong current down one rail, along the armature to the other rail. In essence, it’s a 21st-century slingshot that hurls a very dense, but inert, projectile about twice as fast as a traditional cannon; the kinetic energy of these projectiles is enormous.

It does appear that the science of railguns has reached some level of maturity. The main technological challenges are generating and storing enough electrical power—that is to say, a big engine and a good set of batteries—to allow for repeated pulses of direct current that would yield militarily relevant rates of fire of something like six rounds per minute. Other challenges are to build durable and practical rails, since the launch process generates extreme heat that stresses the rail materials. Further, designing guidance mechanisms that can withstand the heat generated by the speed of the projectile may be difficult. On the plus side, the design of munitions ought to be simplified, as should storage, handling, and logistics, since there is no “warhead” atop a railgun round and explosives are not required. Moreover, the range of railguns would far exceed that of any cannon.

But again, the railgun literature strongly indicates that these are challenges for engineering, not basic science. The Navy is interested in railgun technology as a potential solution to the rising challenges of surface fleet air defense and, especially, cruise and ballistic missile defense. Ironically, the otherwise-disastrous Zumwalt-class destroyer—which is now a $4 billion-per-copy pocket battleship—would make a practical platform for a railgun-based system. The ship is huge for a “destroyer”; at almost 15,000 tons it’s almost twice the size of the current Arleigh Burke-class ships. And it has an electric engine that can not only drive the ship at 30 knots, but also generate huge amounts of additional electricity. The Navy originally planned to buy 32 Zumwalts, but the program has long since run aground—because of its technological and cost problems, but also, most importantly, because the ship was misconceived—and halted at just three. To redesign and revive the project would involve great further expense and be an engineering risk, surely. But it could also result in fielding a game-changing technology that would go far toward solving the “anti-access” problem posed by the growing arsenals of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian anti-ship missiles within the next decade rather than several decades. There is no reason to believe that designing a new class of ships would be any less expensive; indeed it is irrational to think that starting over would save money.

On a smaller scale, electromagnetic guns might become the main armaments on tanks and howitzers. While all the same challenges would recur and be compounded by the need to reduce both the source of the electricity and the storage device to the size of a ground combat vehicle, the fundamental engineering challenges are the same as for ships. And the Army already is experimenting with modifying existing howitzers to shoot the same projectile as an electromagnetic weapon. “It turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster,” says Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who has been held over from the Obama Administration to ensure continuity in defense planning. “We are [saying to the next administration]: ‘Look, we believe this is the place where you want to put your money, but we’re going to have enough money in there for both the electromagnetic rail gun and the powder gun.’”

A related development, also resulting from the ability to generate and store immense amounts of power, that is on the cusp of science fiction and reality is the prospect of using directed energy itself as a weapon. Indeed, some low-level forms of directed energy have been employed by the military for some time: microwave systems that heat the water in skin cells, causing irritation, have been used as a crowd-control measure; microwaves also have been fielded to fry enemy electronic systems. Even the radars on combat aircraft may have limited applications in disrupting the sensors of attacking missiles. And, as far back as 2002, the U.S. Air Force began flying an “Airborne Laser”—basically, a giant high-energy chemical laser stuffed inside a 747 commercial aircraft body—as a missile defense test system. In January 2010 the system successfully passed an intercept test and a month later destroyed two targets in a single engagement. But shortly thereafter, amid one of the many rounds of defense budget reductions during the Obama Administration, the effort was scrapped. In many ways, fielding the system as designed was a bad idea—the laser itself needed to be more powerful and would have required a large and vulnerable aircraft to fly within range of enemy air defenses—but the underlying concept was sound and indicative that such systems were technologically feasible, if tactically immature. Also, it was clear that using electricity rather than chemistry as a power source was a better solution.

Electromagnetic guns, hypersonic projectiles or even directed energy death rays would by themselves not necessarily constitute a revolution in warfare. But these technologies could yield a substantial increase in the capabilities of a wide variety of legacy platforms—and, importantly, again provide U.S. forces with a significant battlefield edge. Most of all, such investments could get the American military back in the habit of continuous modernization and the operational innovation that comes from actually fielding new capabilities. The enthusiasts for “transformation” of the past generation have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope; their model of innovation was that, starved of funds, the U.S. armed services would have to think of new ways to fight. But, through history, the process of change in war has been one that more frequently rewards practical tinkering—matching organizations and doctrine to technologies—more than bold conceptualization. Imagining the tank or the fighter aircraft was the basis for a revolution, but to realize it demanded their integration into combined-arms formation and figuring out how to keep that organization supplied with fossil fuel.

Finally, the experience of recent decades ought to debunk the transformationists’ idea that the United States could afford a geopolitical “strategic pause” to pursue a strategy of innovation. Nor can a global power afford an “offset” approach. To paraphrase the Beatles one last time: Evolution is the real solution. And you can see the plan.

How Intelligence Works (When it Does)
February 2017 • Volume 46, Number 2 • Herbert E. Meyer
Herbert E. Meyer
Founder and President, Storm King Press
________________________________________
Herbert E. Meyer, founder and president of Storm King Press, served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. A recipient of the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, his articles and essays on intelligence have been published in several major newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including Real-World Intelligence and Hard Thinking; two eBooks, How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty; and a recent booklet, Why is the World So Dangerous.
________________________________________

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2017, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.

The performance of our country’s intelligence service is the latest example of an issue exploding into the headlines and becoming a shouting match, while failing to clarify anything about the issue itself. This explosion was ignited last fall by allegations that the Russians hacked into Hillary Clinton’s campaign to help Donald Trump win the election. The blast radius expanded after the election, when rumors surfaced that the Russians had deployed their nasty tactic of kompromat to undermine President Trump’s credibility by spreading rumors about his private behavior while in Moscow years ago. All this, on top of failures that had already wreaked havoc at the CIA and our other intelligence agencies—the 9/11 attacks themselves, the mess over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the weird 2007 National Intelligence Estimate whose key judgment was that Iran had abandoned its nuclear bomb program, Edward Snowden’s NSA espionage activities—has kept the issue of our intelligence service in the headlines.

But before addressing the question of why these failures have occurred, we need to define clearly the role and purpose of our country’s intelligence service, with a focus on how intelligence really works when it’s working properly.

Just utter the word “intelligence” and most people conjure up images of spies, secret satellites peering down on foreign cities and terrorist camps, and rooms full of young technocrats reading private emails and listening to private conversations. These images are accurate, but they reflect the tools and techniques of our intelligence service, rather than its purpose. To understand its purpose, think of a jumbo jet flying at night through turbulent skies—thunder clouds, lightning, other airplanes streaking in all directions and at all altitudes. To navigate through this, the pilot and his crew rely on their radar—the instrument that paints a picture of their environment, enabling them to see what’s going on around them and what lies ahead so they can chart a safe course. Radar doesn’t tell the captain and his crew what to do, but it gives them the accurate information they’ll need to make good decisions.

Our intelligence service is our nation’s radar. Its purpose is to provide the president and his national security team with an accurate picture of what’s going on in the world and what’s likely to happen in the days, months, and years ahead. The assumption is that if the president and his team have this information, they can chart a safe course for our country. And if they can see the distant future soon enough and clearly enough—and if they don’t like what they see—they can take steps to change the future before it happens.

Good intelligence is a combination of information and insight. Information is the raw material, while insight is the finished product. Sometimes this insight takes the form of a top secret report that alerts the president and his team to something that’s about to happen, such as a terrorist attack or the military invasion of one country by another. At other times it is a National Intelligence Estimate, whose purpose is to provide an overall assessment of a major issue—such as North Korea’s nuclear bomb program or the rapid growth of Africa’s middle class—along with a prediction of its future course.

The key to producing good intelligence lies in getting this combination of information and insight right. Intelligence work is like science. You don’t collect information randomly and then stare at it in hopes that something important will pop up. You start with a thesis—in other words, you decide what you want to know. Then you send your collectors out to get it. This is why the key to producing good intelligence lies in asking the right question, rather than in just poring over what’s been randomly collected in hopes that somewhere in the pile of reports and intercepts on your desk you’ll spot something important.

Let me give you an example of how this worked during the Reagan administration. From the end of World War II until 1981, every president’s objective had been not to lose the Cold War. If things were no worse when a president left office than when he took office, he’d done a good job. But President Reagan didn’t want to tread water—he wanted to win the Cold War. In other words, he switched from defense to offense. So Reagan’s great director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, asked the CIA’s Soviet Division two obvious questions: Where is the Soviet Union weak? and Where is it most vulnerable? The answer he received was: We don’t know. No one’s ever asked this before. Our spies had been so focused on Soviet strengths—infantry divisions, nuclear missiles, tanks, submarines, and so forth—that we had no intelligence on Soviet weaknesses, such as its imploding economy. Under Casey’s leadership, we refocused our collection efforts and, not surprisingly, found all sorts of Soviet vulnerabilities that hadn’t been grasped because no one had bothered looking for them. President Reagan used these weaknesses and vulnerabilities to put more and more pressure on the Kremlin. Eight years later the Berlin Wall came down, and two years after that the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

In the intelligence business, just as in scientific research, a thesis sometimes turns out to be wrong. The collectors can’t find what you want, because it isn’t there. When this happens—and it happens to even the best scientists and intelligence officials—you must abandon your flawed thesis and re-think the issue. If you refuse to do this, you’re like a scientist who continues to insist that the Earth is flat—or a president who continues to insist that ISIS is like a “junior varsity” team.

February 2017 • Volume 46, Number 2 • Herbert E. Meyer

When the collectors have done their work—when they’ve told the analysts what they want to know—the intelligence process shifts from gathering information to creating insight. It’s the difference between shopping for food in the supermarket and actually cooking dinner.

Insight is the product of knowledge, experience, and, above all, good judgment. You cannot say something insightful, or even something intelligent, on a subject or issue about which you don’t know anything. So the most senior intelligence analysts must be among the world’s most knowledgeable individuals in their fields of expertise—the Mideast, Russia, China, nuclear weapons, economic development, etc. And they must have that one elusive and unquantifiable skill that so often brings success in every venture: the ability to spot a pattern with the fewest possible facts—the ability to look at what’s known and combine this with their own knowledge, experience, and good judgment, to come up with a new idea or insight. This is the skill we see in great scientists like Albert Einstein, in great entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, and in great intelligence chiefs like Bill Casey.

Back in January, when U.S. intelligence chiefs released an unclassified version of the briefing they gave to President-Elect Trump about Russian efforts to influence the November election, Americans learned a phrase that’s unique to the world of intelligence: key judgment. It was a key judgment that Russia had hacked into John Podesta’s email server, and a key judgment that Vladimir Putin preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. Since these key judgments understandably erupted into a nasty political brawl, let’s take a moment to understand what a key judgment really is. Simply put, it’s the conclusion reached by our most senior intelligence officials, based not only on the evidence they were able to collect, but also on the insights it enabled them to reach based on their knowledge and experience.

A key judgment isn’t the same as a jury verdict. A jury verdict is based solely on the evidence presented to it. In a murder trial, unless the prosecutors can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty, you must vote for acquittal. But in a National Intelligence Estimate, you reach a key judgment by starting with the evidence, then combining it with your own knowledge and experience to reach a conclusion.

Precisely because key judgments go beyond evidence, an intelligence service must be trusted by policymakers to be effective. Policymakers may not always like what they’re told—as when the obvious implication of a National Intelligence Estimate is that a favorite policy is heading for catastrophe—but if they trust the intelligence service, they will know that what they’ve been told is likely true. And this trust needs to be earned.

This is how it was during the Reagan administration, because ev¬eryone from the President on down knew perfectly well that the intelligence official who not only had read the final version of an Estimate and signed off on it—but also played a major role in writing it—was the CIA director himself. Like every other member of the cabinet, Bill Casey was a busy man. But to Casey, being in charge of our intelligence service meant more than merely being its top administrator and dealing with budgets and bureaucracies. It meant that he himself was our country’s top intelligence analyst. When the final draft of an Estimate landed on his desk—more precisely, when I walked into his office and handed it to him—Casey would take that draft, pick up a pen and a yellow legal pad, and go through it word by word.

Sometimes he made a change that clarified a sentence. Other times he asked a question that forced us to go back and re-think what we’d written. When that happened, we either changed the draft or asked to meet with Casey to try and persuade him that the original version was better. He would listen and then make his decision. All of us who worked closely with Bill Casey—he insisted that everyone, including the CIA’s most junior analysts, call him Bill—were astounded by the amount of time he devoted to getting the final draft of an Estimate, or the final version of the President’s Daily Brief, just right. He did this by sitting quietly in his office, reading, writing, and—something that so few officials in Washington, D.C. set aside the time to do—thinking.

February 2017 • Volume 46, Number 2 • Herbert E. Meyer

So why has our intelligence service suffered so many failures during the last decade or so, losing the trust of so many? Because it’s been run by career bureaucrats and administrators who rose to the top by managing intelligence rather than actually doing it. That’s like putting an airline executive with an MBA and a law degree into the cockpit of a jumbo jet. And like bureaucrats and administrators everywhere, our recent intelligence chiefs focused on structure rather than on people. Of course all organizations, including intelligence services, need the proper structure. But especially in an intelligence service, good structure is worthless without the right people—in this case world-class analysts who are deeply knowledgeable about the Mideast, China, Russia, terrorism, and all the rest. Make a list of our country’s leading experts on these subjects. How many of them have held top-level jobs in our intelligence service during the last dozen or so years? How often have the leaders of our intelligence service reached out to these people to seek their advice? The correct answers are: none and rarely.

We are still in the early days of the Trump administration, but to borrow an overused Washington cliché, we should be cautiously optimistic about the future of our intelligence service. Neither Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats nor Director of Central Intelligence Mike Pompeo are professional bureaucrats. They’ve built their careers on substance rather than on management. Each of them has proven he can talk about the key issues that confront us with an impressive level of personal knowledge and insight. Each is capable of actually doing intelligence rather than merely overseeing it.

This will require restoring the correct balance between collection and analysis. Obviously, collecting information is crucially important work. Collecting information through technology—satellites, intercepts, and so forth—is intense to the point of exhaustion. Collecting information through espionage is dangerous and sometimes fatal. All of us owe these collectors a huge debt of gratitude. What they need now is guidance from the top—a clear sense of what to look for, rather than just being told to sweep in whatever information they can in hopes it will prove useful.

Turning this raw material into first-rate intelligence will require the active participation of our country’s best geo-strategic experts in think tanks, universities, corporations, and increasingly the blogosphere. Directors Coats and Pompeo should recruit the ones they can, and be in close touch with the others. This doesn’t mean agreeing with everything these experts say and write. It means listening to them and blending their information and insights with what’s been gathered covertly, in order to reach the clearest, most accurate conclusions about what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen in the future.

Finally, Coats and Pompeo will need to do the one thing their recent predecessors didn’t do, either because they didn’t recognize the need to do it or didn’t have the ability. They will need to set aside time—quite a bit of time—to sit quietly in their offices and think. Their objective must be to paint an accurate picture of what’s going on in the world and of what’s likely to happen in the future. If they can do this, President Trump and his national security team will have what they need to see America safely through today’s global turbulence: radar.

In this commentary, you appear to be engaging in sophistry. In other words, you appear to be decisively imparting falsehoods. First you fabricate a definition of the “American elite” comprised exclusively of progressives. Then you fabricate a reality where the mainstream press disseminates lies, where college campuses lack diversity and muzzle free speech and where progressives have fallen down in addressing the problems of the inner cities. Finally you fabricate an argument that the so-called elite have “titles, brands and buzz” but no “demonstrable knowledge or proven character”. This is a perfect example of deflection and psychological projection. You have, wittingly or not, described your populist hero Donald Trump, a man with “brands and buzz”, who disseminates lies, impugns minorities, muzzles the press, cares little about the inner cities and clearly lacks knowledge or character.

– Allan Cooper

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Allan Cooper

One of the themes of the Angry Reader column is the predictable use by Leftists such as yourself of personal invective (“sophistry”, “falsehoods”, “fabricate”, etc.) along with intellectual laziness.

Take your allegation that I wrote that elites are “comprised exclusively of progressives”.

How does that assertion square with my allusion in the column on elites to “many in the Republican Party as well” or to the “Bush or Clinton families”. Are the Bushes and the Republican Party progressives?

So it is hard to take you seriously when the first allegation you make is demonstrably false.

And it sadly it is all downhill from there:

1) Are you arguing for intellectual diversity on campus? I think the recent Middlebury and Berkeley violence highlights my suggestion that there is little intellectual tolerance on campus.

2) Are you suggesting that the media is not progressive? JournoList, Wikileaks, and the epidemic of fake news from Rathergate and Brian Williams to the MLK bust allegation or Trump’s supposed romps in a Moscow hotel room substantiate the unreliability of the press, which by all polls and its own admission is overwhelming liberal.

3) You doubt the nature of life in the inner city or its governance? The inner cities are in crisis; most have had Democratic mayors and councils for the last thirty years and more; again are you contending that fact?

Donald Trump is not “my populist hero”; can you find any indication that I wrote that?

More to the point: what Trump says and what he actually does are two different things. I will find him guilty of “muzzling the press” when his Justice Department hounds journalists of the Associated Press or taps the communications of a reporter in the fashion of Obama’s treatment of James Rosen, or expands the reach of the NSA and the dissemination of its intelligence or depends on fawning press coverage to advance his agenda in the fashion of the “god”, “smartest president ever” and leg-tingling Barack Obama.

There are various ways of defining knowledge and character.

Trump is, of course, a flawed individual like many of us; but his failings are transparent, quite unlike those of Barack Obama, to take one example (Hillary Clinton is another).

With Trump, what you see is what you get. With Obama and his subordinates we were given constant utopian platitudes about hope and change, but experienced quite different dangerous deeds: expansions of NSA electronic surveillance, lying under oath by Eric Holder and James Clapper, the warping of the IRS, scandals in the VA, GSA, Secret Service, EPA, etc., nullifications of federal law by executive order non-enforcement, the jailing of a video maker on the false narrative of culpability for Benghazi (about which lies were promulgated by Susan Rice), the “echo chamber” manipulation of the “know nothing” press, assassinations abroad of US citizens, bombing Libya without congressional consent, the likely illegal monitoring and leaking of communications of the Trump campaign (as reported by the NY Times, Washington Post, and BBC), constant mellifluous untruth (you can keep your doctor and health plan, the president will not by fiat grant amnesties, the mythologies of the Cairo Speech), and often bizarre references to foreign leaders (from the open mic promise to be more flexible with Putin but only after the election to the gratuitous insults of Netanyahu [“coward”, “chickenshit”]). I learned in farming early on that the loud and uncouth are easier to deal with than the glib and shifty-eyed; the former may assault you senses, but the latter your person and livelihood.

So I think you need to redefine the boundaries of wisdom; they are not just calibrated by “57 states”- and “corps-men”-like Columbia and Harvard degrees.

Surviving the Manhattan real estate cauldron may take more savvy and cunning than the sorts of identity-politics navigation in colleges and liberal circles as outlined in Dreams From My Father. I have spent most of my adult life in two pursuits: academia, often in the circle of those with impressive graduate degrees, and farming with those sometimes without high school diplomas.

I saw little difference among the two groups in terms of ethics, saw the less articulate often more direct and transparent, and could never quite tell which group was the smarter, although what I heard in the faculty lounge and academic senate was a few rings down on the intelligence scale from what I heard and saw when talking to well drillers, pump installers, and tractor mechanics.

How and Why the Senate Must Reform the Filibuster
January 2017 • Volume 46, Number 1 • Tom McClintock
Tom McClintock
U.S. House of Representatives
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Tom McClintock has served as the U.S. Representative for California’s 4th congressional district since 2009. He received his B.A. from UCLA. He is a senior member of the House Natural Resources Committee, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Federal Lands, and serves on the House Budget Committee. Prior to his election to Congress, he served for 22 years in the California legislature and ran for governor in California’s recall election in 2003.
________________________________________

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 11, 2017, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

The Senate prides itself as being the greatest deliberative body in the world. When Jefferson asked Washington why the Constitutional Convention created the Senate, Washington compared it to the hot tea Jefferson cooled in a saucer. “We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”

The Founders designed the two houses of Congress to have different perspectives and temperaments. The House, representing smaller constituencies and constantly up for re-election, would reflect the hot passions of popular will. This is a vital component of representative government, but more is required in making good decisions. The Founders knew, as Benjamin Franklin put it, that “Passion governs, and she never governs wisely.” The Senate, with longer terms and generally larger constituencies, was designed to temper passions with reason, which requires deliberation. A lot of deliberation.

Central to ensuring this deliberation is the unfettered freedom of debate accorded in the Senate. While the House rations time parsimoniously, often to just a single hour of debate even on major legislation, the Senate insists on giving all its members the widest possible latitude to hold a question up to every light.

A popular aphorism in the House of Representatives is, “The other party is the opposition; the Senate is the enemy.” As a member of the House myself, I find the Senate’s byzantine rules frustrating; but after all, frustrating House members is part of the Senate’s mission. Yes, the Senate is a pain, but where would we be without it?

On the other hand, deliberation is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is a means to achieve wise and enlightened legislation with the consent of the people. And this is where the Senate is on the verge of dysfunction.

Over the last several congressional elections, and most conspicuously in the recent presidential election, the American people have sent a clear signal that they want a major change in public policy. It is the duty of Congress to respond. To do so, it needs to deliberate wisely and in good faith, with all sides participating and all voices heard. But then this deliberation must result in laws that accord with the people’s will.

Some in the new Congress have set a positive tone, but we have also heard reactionary elements vow to thwart the popular mandate. It is natural for the minority to use every available means to try to change the majority’s mind or temper its fervor, and our system offers it many ways to do so. But that’s different from obstruction, which is why these vows by some senators are as disturbing as they are credible.

They are credible because the modern Senate filibuster has become a tool for the minority to block any meaningful legislation from being enacted or even considered. Given its record of abuse in recent years—by both parties—the Senate needs to repair its rules regarding the filibuster if it is to have any hope of performing its constitutional duty.

January 2017 • Volume 46, Number 1 • Tom McClintock

The parliamentary tactic of a minority thwarting the will of the majority by talking a bill to death is nothing new. The Roman Senate’s rules required business to conclude before sunset. Cato the Younger discovered that he could block Julius Caesar’s initiatives by talking until dusk descended on the Senate chamber.

Caesar responded by throwing Cato in jail. Common parliamentary practice dealt with the tactic by allowing a motion to “order the previous question”—in other words, to close debate and vote—often requiring a two-thirds vote. This super-majority threshold to close debate is rooted in the principle that a significant minority should be able to extend debate. After all, a minority exists to convince the majority to its way of thinking and often identifies flaws in a proposal that a majority doesn’t see in its rush to adopt. This is the fruit of deliberation and the essence of deliberative assemblies.

But this parliamentary principle assumes that there is an actual debate, that it is germane to the subject at hand, and that it is not conducted in a manifestly dilatory manner.

Within a few decades of the Amer¬ican Founding, senators rediscovered Cato’s practice of killing a bill by killing time, and the Senate filibuster was born. Yet it was rarely used because of its natural limitations. A filibustering senator had to remain for the most part at his desk and on his feet. In 1908, for example, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin held the floor for 18 hours—speaking for long periods of time, and demanding dozens of quorum calls and roll-call votes—to stall a banking reform bill. The bill eventually passed, but not without significant consternation on both sides, due to the fact that until the filibustered matter was disposed of, the Senate could not move on to other business.

The filibuster is fundamentally different today because of two changes to Senate rules—changes that explain the body’s current inability to act. The first occurred in 1917 in response to a filibuster of something called the Armed Ship Bill. The Senate adopted a cloture rule setting the threshold for ending debate at two-thirds of those present and voting, later changed to three-fifths of the whole Senate. Even then, this change was in keeping with common parliamentary practice. And even after its passage, the filibuster’s physically demanding nature meant that it was seldom employed. There were only 58 filibusters in the next 52 years—barely one per year.

But beginning in 1970, the number of filibusters exploded by a magnitude of 36-fold. There have been 1,700 in the 46 years since then. Why? Because in 1970, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield instituted a “two-track” system that allowed the Senate, by unanimous consent or the approval of the minority leader, to bypass a filibustered bill and go on to another. This relieved a filibustering senator of the job of having to talk through the night and it relieved his colleagues of their frustration.
The filibuster thus entered the couch-potato world of virtual reality, where an actual speech is no longer required to block a vote. Today the mere threat of a filibuster suffices to kill a bill as the Senate shrugs and goes on to other business. The filibuster has been stripped of all the unpleasantness that discouraged its use and encouraged compromise and resolution.
Whereas the filibuster prior to 1970 was designed to ensure debate, after adoption of the two-track system it mutated into a procedure that prevents debate. As a result, the greatest deliberative body in the world now has difficulty deliberating on anything of importance.

During the last session of Congress, the House sent hundreds of bills to the Senate, including appropriations bills required to fund the government. In¬stead of amending those bills and sending them back to the House, the Senate seized up—not for lack of majority will, but because of minority recalcitrance and the post-1970 filibuster.

January 2017 • Volume 46, Number 1 • Tom McClintock

This represents three serious dangers to constitutional government.

First, the legislative branch cannot function if one house proves unable to act on major legislation, and the atrophy of the legislative branch drives a corresponding hypertrophy of the executive branch. It is perhaps the single greatest reason for the rise of the imperial executive in recent decades. President Obama’s constant refrain, “If Congress fails to act I will,” is poisonous to a constitutional republic—but it is inevitable if the legislature wastes away. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the modern Senate filibuster has created one at the heart of our Constitution.

Second, because the American peo¬ple hold the sovereign authority in our country but delegate sovereign power to their elected representatives, they have every reason to lose faith in their government if their broad sentiments expressed in elections are not translated into law. This is why the belief that “my vote doesn’t matter”—a belief suicidal to a democratic republic—is increasingly heard expressed in our country today.

Third, the ability of the minority to cause gridlock in the legislative branch undermines the authority of the Constitution itself. Implicit in the design of Congress is its power to act on most matters by majority vote. Ex¬traordinary majorities are reserved only for extraordinary matters such as treaties, constitutional amendments, impeachments, expulsions, and veto overrides. The practical effect of the modern filibuster is to replace the constitutional benchmark of majority rule with an artificial threshold of three-fifths.

A central concept in maintaining the balance of powers is the assumption that the members of each branch of government will jealously and aggressively defend their prerogatives against the others. So why do senators allow their body to be paralyzed?
Many argue that the current 60-vote cloture threshold is necessary to prevent one party from running amok; that the requirement for an extraordinary majority assures bipartisanship and compromise. They rightly warn that if legislation is to stand the test of time, it must have a certain degree of bi-partisan consensus that the cloture rule facilitates. Yet when one looks at the Senate today, it’s hard to find much collegiality or compromise, both of which require the give-and-take of good-faith deliberation. Nor is compromise possible if the matter to be compromised can’t be considered. If the minority can block an initiative by a mere threat to filibuster, it has no incentive to pursue compromise.

Republican defenders of the modern filibuster note that the greatest growth of government occurs when Democrats hold both the White House and Congress. The current rules, they argue, are an essential brake for the minority to use at such times. But unfortunately, these rules have proven even more effective at blocking legislation that shrinks government. The result is a ratcheting effect that locks in every government expansion, even those that prove disastrous.

January 2017 • Volume 46, Number 1 • Tom McClintock

One obvious solution to the filibuster is to require a simple majority to close debate, as the House has done for centuries. But this defeats one of the chief purposes of the Senate: a significant minority ought to be heard over the objections of a majority. So how can this purpose be preserved, while restoring the Senate’s ability to legislate?

First, the Senate should get rid of the two-track system that allows it to bypass a filibustered bill and reinstitute the pre-1970 requirement that filibusterers hold the floor. The fact that the number of filibusters exploded after the two-track system was introduced speaks for itself. Once the Senate removed all the fuss and bother of the filibuster, filibusters became common. Yes, this means the Senate would have to deal with a filibuster before moving on to other matters—but it is precisely this inconvenience that made it such a rare event and built pressure on both sides to resolve an impasse.

Second, the Senate should restore the parliamentary principle that debate must be germane to the pending piece of legislation. The Senate may pride itself on colorful tales of Huey Long reading Cajun recipes on the Senate floor. But how does this practice fulfill the role of the Senate as a deliberative body? Time on the Senate floor is a critical and limited public resource. Tolerating irrelevant speeches squanders that resource and makes a mockery of the Senate. Senate rules already require germane debate during the first three hours of a legislative day—but not after that! Go figure.

Third, make the “motion to proceed” undebatable, or at least subject to a maj¬ority vote. This incidental motion is itself now subject to filibuster, which prevents the Senate from even getting to actual bills. Great debates should be had on great matters—but not great debates on whether to debate.

Fourth, limit senators to two speeches on a question. Under current Senate rules, a single senator can make two speeches on every motion every legislative day.

Fifth, after a certain period of debate has elapsed—during which filibustering can occur—allow a majority to set a limit for individual speeches on a pending question to something like two hours. A senator who can’t get to the heart of a matter in two hours isn’t trying very hard.

January 2017 • Volume 46, Number 1 • Tom McClintock

Some senators have argued that the Senate can repair itself within its current rules. The majority leader could decline to sidetrack filibustered bills, force a debate until the minority is exhausted, and hold the Senate in session to avoid resetting the two-speech per day limit. But experience has shown that in a battle of wills, a determined minority will prevail. The surer course is to restore the original parliamentary principles of debate to Senate rules.

There are two ways to implement these reforms. One is to follow the precedent established by Senate Democrats in 2013 when they lowered the cloture threshold to a majority for non-Supreme Court presidential nominees: ignore the rules as they are written, declare a new and fictitious interpretation, and impose that interpretation by overturning the parliamentary ruling of the chair.

This “nuclear option” might be effective, but it is highly corrosive to the parliamentary procedure required for a well-functioning legislature. Pretending that a rule says something different than it does is a shortcut to anarchy.

The other way is to invoke what re-formers over the years have called the “constitutional option.” Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution grants each house the power to establish its own rules. Senate tradition holds that, by virtue of its staggered terms, it is a continuing body and therefore its rules continue in full force from session to session until amended. Those rules require a two-thirds vote for cloture on a change to the rules, creating the paradox that the very provision that needs reform prevents reform.

This doctrine of the Senate as a continuing body, however, is belied by the fact that all pending motions at the close of one Congress do not extend into the next. It also runs afoul of the bedrock principle that one Congress may not bind the next. A strong case can be made that until the Senate adopts rules to govern its two-year session, it is operating solely on precedent. It retains its constitutional authority to adopt new rules by a simple majority vote for the current session unfettered by hindrances imposed by a previous one.

The choice of whether the Senate majority restores its constitutional role in lawmaking is its own to make, to live with, and to answer for. In making that choice, it needs to consider whether its current rules of debate advance or obstruct its role as a deliberative body with the responsibility of passing reasonable laws that comport with the public will.

Of historic moments like these, Shakespeare’s Brutus said, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.”

Voters elected Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and they expect action. They’ll get it from the President and from the House. But in order for the Senate to rise to this occasion, it must reform its rules.

Restoring America’s Economic Mobility
September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley
Frank Buckley
Author, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America
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Frank Buckley is a Foundation Professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he has taught since 1989. Previously he was a visiting Olin Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and he has also taught at McGill Law School, the Sorbonne, and Sciences Po in Paris. He received his B.A. from McGill University and his LL.M. from Harvard University. He is a senior editor of The American Spectator and the author of several books, including The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America and The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.
________________________________________

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on July 11, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Today the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We didn’t think we were divided into different classes. Neither did Marx.

America was an exception to Marx’s theory of social progress. By that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to communism. But the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around, was not turning communist. Marx had an explanation for that. “True enough, the classes already exist,” he wrote of the United States, but they “are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another.” In other words, when you have economic and social mobility, you don’t go communist.

That is the country in which some imagine we still live, Horatio Alger’s America—a country defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. But they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what was once a classless country, and a dominant New Class—as social critic Christopher Lasch called it—has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind it.

One can measure these things empirically by comparing the correlation between the earnings of fathers and sons. Pew’s Economic Mobility Project ranks Britain at 0.5, which means that if a father earns £100,000 more than the median, his son will earn £50,000 more than the average member of his cohort. That’s pretty aristocratic. On the other end of the scale, the most economically mobile society is Denmark, with a correlation of 0.15. The U.S. is at 0.47, almost as immobile as Britain.

A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has occurred. If they don’t get it, however, American voters do. For the first time, Americans don’t believe their children will be as well off as they have been. They see an economy that’s stalled, one in which jobs are moving offshore. In the first decade of this century, U.S. multinationals shed 2.9 million U.S. jobs while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. General Electric provides a striking example. Jeffrey Immelt became the company’s CEO in 2001, with a mission to advance stock price. He did this in part by reducing GE’s U.S. workforce by 34,000 jobs. During the same period, the company added 25,000 jobs overseas. Ironically, President Obama chose Immelt to head his Jobs Council.
According to establishment Repub¬licans, none of this can be helped. We are losing middle-class jobs because of the move to a high-tech world that creates jobs for a cognitive elite and destroys them for everyone else. But that doesn’t describe what’s happening. We are losing middle-class jobs, but lower-class jobs are expanding. Automation is changing the way we make cars, but the rich still need their maids and gardeners. Middle-class jobs are also lost as a result of regulatory and environmental barriers, especially in the energy sector. And the skills-based technological change argument is entirely implausible: countries that beat us hands down on mobility are just as technologically advanced. Folks in Denmark aren’t exactly living in the Stone Age.

This is why voters across the spectrum began to demand radical change. What did the Republican elite offer in response? At a time of maximal crisis they have been content with minimal goals, like Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan in 2012. How many Americans remember even one of those points? What we remember instead is Romney’s remark about 47 percent of Americans being takers. That was Romney’s way of recognizing the class divide—and in the election, Americans took notice and paid him back with interest.
Since 2012, establishment Republicans have continued to be less than concerned for the plight of ordinary Americans. Sure, they want economic growth, but it doesn’t seem to matter into whose pockets the money flows. There are even the “conservative” pundits who offer the pious hope that drug-addicted Trump supporters will hurry up and die. That’s one way to ameliorate the class struggle, but it doesn’t exactly endear anyone to the establishment.

The southern writer Flannery O’Connor once attended a dinner party in New York given for her and liberal intellectual Mary McCarthy. At one point the issue of Catholicism came up, and McCarthy offered the opinion that the Eucharist is “just a symbol,” albeit “a pretty one.” O’Connor, a pious Catholic, bristled: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.” Likewise, the principles held up as sacrosanct by establishment Republicans might be logically unassailable, derived like theorems from a set of axioms based on a pure theory of natural rights. But if I don’t see them making people better off, I say to Hell with them. And so do the voters this year. What the establishment Republicans should ask themselves is Anton Chigurh’s question in No Country for Old Men: If you followed your principles, and your principles brought you to this, what good are your principles?

September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley

Had Marx been asked what would happen to America if it ever became economically immobile, we know what his answer would be: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And also Donald Trump. The anger expressed by the voters in 2016—their support for candidates from far outside the traditional political class—has little parallel in American history. We are accustomed to protest movements on the Left, but the wholesale repudiation of the establishment on the Right is something new. All that was solid has melted into air, and what has taken its place is a kind of right-wing Marxism, scornful of Washington power brokers and sneering pundits and repelled by America’s immobile, class-ridden society.

Establishment Republicans came up with the “right-wing Marxist” label when House Speaker John Boehner was deposed, and labels stick when they have the ring of truth. So it is with the right-wing Marxist. He is right-wing because he seeks to return to an America of economic mobility. He has seen how broken education and immigration systems, the decline of the rule of law, and the rise of a supercharged regulatory state serve as barriers to economic improvement. And he is a Marxist to the extent that he sees our current politics as the politics of class struggle, with an insurgent middle class that seeks to surmount the barriers to mobility erected by an aristocratic New Class. In his passion, he is also a revolutionary. He has little time for a Republican elite that smirks at his heroes—heroes who communicate through their brashness and rudeness the fact that our country is in a crisis. To his more polite critics, the right-wing Marxist says: We are not so nice as you!

The right-wing Marxist notes that establishment Republicans who decry crony capitalism are often surrounded by lobbyists and funded by the Chamber of Commerce. He is unpersuaded when they argue that government subsidies are needed for their friends. He does not believe that the federal bailouts of the 2008-2012 TARP program and the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest and quantitative easing policies were justified. He sees that they doubled the size of public debt over an eight-year period, and that our experiment in consumer protection for billionaires took the oxygen out of the economy and produced a jobless Wall Street recovery.

The right-wing Marxist’s vision of the good society is not so very different from that of the JFK-era liberal; it is a vision of a society where all have the opportunity to rise, where people are judged by the content of their character, and where class distinctions are a thing of the past. But for the right wing Marxist, the best way to reach the goal of a good society is through free markets, open competition, and the removal of wasteful government barriers.

Readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will have encountered the word palimpsest, used to describe a manuscript in which one text has been written over another, and in which traces of the original remain. So it is with Canada, a country that beats the U.S. hands down on economic mobility. Canada has the reputation of being more liberal than the U.S., but in reality it is more conservative because its liberal policies are written over a page of deep conservatism.

Whereas the U.S. comes in at a highly immobile 0.47 on the Pew mobility scale, Canada is at 0.19, very close to Denmark’s 0.15. What is further remarkable about Canada is that the difference is mostly at the top and bottom of the distribution. Between the tenth and 90th deciles there isn’t much difference between the two countries. The difference is in the bottom and top ten percent, where the poorest parents raise the poorest kids and the richest parents raise the richest kids.

September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley

For parents in the top U.S. decile, 46 percent of their kids will end up in the top two deciles and only 2 percent in the bottom decile. The members of the top decile comprise a New Class of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies, and media types—a group that wields undue influence in both political parties and dominates our culture. These are the people who said yes, there is an immigration crisis—but it’s caused by our failure to give illegals a pathway to citizenship!

There’s a top ten percent in Canada, of course, but its children are far more likely to descend into the middle or lower classes. There’s also a bottom ten percent, but its children are far more likely to rise to the top. The country of opportunity, the country we’ve imagined ourselves to be, isn’t dead—it moved to Canada, a country that ranks higher than the U.S. on measures of economic freedom. Yes, Canada has its much-vaunted Medicare system, but cross-border differences in health care don’t explain the mobility levels. And when you add it all up, America has a more generous welfare system than Canada or just about anywhere else. To explain Canada’s higher mobility levels, one has to turn to differences in education systems, immigration laws, regulatory burdens, the rule of law, and corruption—on all of which counts, Canada is a more conservative country.

America’s K-12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. Its universities are great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they arrived. What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. One study has concluded that if American public school students were magically raised to Canadian levels, the economic gain would amount to a 20 percent annual pay increase for the average American worker.

The U.S. has a two-tiered educational system: a superb set of schools and colleges for the upper classes and a mediocre set for everyone else. The best of our colleges are the best anywhere, but the average Canadian school is better than the average American one. At both the K-12 and college levels, Canadian schools have adhered more closely to a traditional, conservative set of offerings. For K-12, a principal reason for the difference is the greater competition offered in Canada, with its publicly-supported church-affiliated schools. With barriers like America’s Blaine Amendments—state laws preventing public funding of religious schools—lower-class students in the U.S. must enjoy the dubious blessing of a public school education.

What about immigration? Canada doesn’t have a problem with illegal aliens—it deports them. As for the legal intake, Canadian policies have a strong bias towards admitting immigrants who will confer a benefit on Canadian citizens. Even in absolute numbers, Canada admits more immigrants under economic categories than the U.S., where most legal immigrants qualify instead under family preference categories. As a result, on average, immigrants to the U.S. are less educated than U.S. natives, and unlike in Canada, second- and third-generation U.S. immigrants earn less than their native-born counterparts. In short, the U.S. immigration system imports inequality and immobility. If immigration isn’t an issue in Canada, that’s because it’s a system Trump voters would love.

For those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder who seek to rise, nothing is more important than the rule of law, property rights, and the sanctity of contract provided by a mature and efficient legal system. The alternative—in place today in America—is a network of elites whose personal bonds supply the trust that is needed before deals can be done and promises relied on. With its more traditional legal system, Canada better respects the sanctity of contract and is less likely to weaken property rights with an American-style civil justice system which at times resembles a slot machine of judicially-sanctioned theft. Americans are great at talking about the rule of law, but in reality we don’t have much standing to do so.

Then there’s corruption. As ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, America is considerably more corrupt than most of the rest of the First World. With our K Street lobbyists and our donor class, we’ve spawned the greatest concentration of money and influence ever. And corruption costs. In a regression model, the average family’s earnings would increase from $55,000 to $60,000 were we to ascend to Canada’s level of non-corruption, and to $68,000 if we moved to Denmark’s level.

In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center. Sadly, that is a rational response to the way things are. America is a different country today, and a much nastier one. For politically engaged Republicans, the figure is six percent. That in a nutshell explains the Trump phenomenon and the disintegration of the Republican establishment. If the people don’t trust the government, tinkering with entitlement reform is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
American legal institutions are consistently more liberal than those in Canada, and they are biased towards a privileged class of insiders who are better educated and wealthier than the average American. That’s why America has become an aristocracy. By contrast, Canadian legal institutions aren’t slanted to an aristocracy.

The paradox is that Canadians employ conservative, free market means to achieve the liberal end of economic mobility. And that points to America’s way back: acknowledge that the promise of America has diminished, then emulate Canada.

Joseph R. John
To
jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Jan 9 at 7:26 AM
His Legacy: Ignoring The Genocide Of Christians Over An 8 Year Period

By Capt Joseph R. John, January 9, 2017: 330

For 8 years Obama failed to condemn the genocide perpetrated by Al Q’ieda, ISIS, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) who continued to butcher over 200,000 Syrian and Assyrian Christians. Current media reports state Obama is trying to salvage, what he calls, “His Legacy.” Obama will never be able to salvage “His Legacy”, because he turned a blind eye to the genocide that Al Q’ieda, ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorist, and members of the MB perpetrated against Syrian and Assyrian Christians. Obama repeatedly ignored pleas by 56 US Congressmen, on both sides of the isle, to provide Christians families with small arms weapons to protect themselves.

Al Q’ idea, ISIS, and the MB crucified Christians, beheaded them, burned them alive, drowned them in cages, buried them alive, cut small children’s bodies in two, forced men to kneel in order to shoot them behind the head, and threw Christians from high buildings to their deaths. In the last 2 years, ISIS has perpetrated 143 “Radical Islamic Terrorists” attacks in 29 countries, murdering 2043 people in “Hate Crimes” and “Crimes Against Humanity”; those murderous acts were executed to prevent Christians from exercising their “Freedom of Religion.”

While Obama was ignoring the genocide in the Middle East, he minimized the 93 “Radica Islamic Terrorist” attacks in the United States (2/3rd of those attacks occurred in the last 4 years). Yet for 8 years, Obama refused to allow personnel in the White House, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the FBI, Department of Defense, the Justice Department, 17 Intelligence Agencies, the US Armed Forces, and the State Department to properly identify terrorists killing Americans, as “Radical Islamic Terrorists” nor did he allow Government Agencies to associate ISIS, MB, MB Front Groups, or Al Q’ieda with Islam.

House Speaker Paul Ryan called President Obama’s failure to protect persecuted Christians “abysmal.” He said Obama has had a distinct disinterest in including “Religious Freedom” and the “Genocide of Christians”, among his foreign policy priorities. Obama even left the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom vacant for nearly two years.

On September 30th, the New York Times reported on a leaked recording of Secretary of State John Kerry conversing with leaders of the Syrian opposition fighting Syria’s President, Bashar Assad. It cast light on Obama’s “Laisez Faire” attitude toward ISIS, and his continued minimization of the strength of the ISIS, which he referred to as a “JV Team”.

In 2012, Kerry indicated that Obama believed that allowing ISIS to grow in strength and receive weapons delivered from Libya would serve his objective of helping oust Syria’s President, Bashar Assad, without the need to employ US Military combat personnel on the ground. WikiLeaks E-mails back up Turkish President Erdogen’s assertion that the US has given support to terror groups, including ISIS in Syria.

In 2008, Obama said the reason he ignored the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Intelligence community, and pulled all US Military forces out of Iraq, was because there wasn’t a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. Today there are nearly 5000 US Military combat personnel on the ground in Iraq, and hundreds of US Military combat personnel in Syria, and still there is no Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq (2 US Military combat personnel have been killed, and 14 were wounded in Syria in October).

According to the New York Times report on Kerry’s conversation with Assad’s Syrian opposition, Obama did not calculate that Assad would turn to Russia for military support, making ISIS’ opposition to his regime irrelevant. During the period when Obama was hoping ISIS would oppose Assad, ISIS genocide against Christians increased; Obama turned a blind eye to ISIS’ genocide and the rapid growth of ISIS from several thousand terrorists, to an multi-national trained force of over 50,000 “Radical Islamic Terrorists”.

Obama tried to minimize and ignore the growth in strength of what he called the ISIS “JV Team”. Obama’s continued minimization of ISIS resulted in 50 frustrated Central Command Intelligence Analyst co-signing a letter, protesting the fact that they were being pressured by Generals to produce intelligence reports that underestimate the true strength of ISIS and the danger ISIS’ Islamic State posed in the Middle East. Those Generals were, being pressured by their superiors in the Pentagon, to go along with Obama’s underestimated strength of ISIS.

In the last 8 years, while Obama occupied the Oval Office, ISIS easily grew rapidly because there were no longer a US Military force in Iraq, and it spread its tentacles into 29 countries, perpetrating over 8986 murders worldwide (1123/year), as well as the genocide of 200,000 Syrian and Assyrian Christians. In the previous 27 years Radical Islamic Terrorist murdered 4278 people worldwide (158/year).

In a 2013 Congressional hearings, evidence was presented from DIA intelligence reports that from 2011-2012, US Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens was shipping weapons from deposed Libyan Ruler, Muammar Gaddafi’s armory. Tons of weapons were being shipped from the port of Benghazi to Syria via Turkish ports, then on to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Q’ieda, and ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorists, who were opposing Bashar Assad.

It was another of Obama’s “Gun Running Operations”, following the “Fast and Furious Gun Running Operation” to Mexican Drug Cartels, that resulted in the death of a US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

An April 22, 2014 report entitled, “How America Changed Sides in the War On Terror”, identified Hakim Belhaj, as a key Al Q’ieda operative, was known Libyan terrorist who the European Union banned, and who was identified as the principal organizer of the Radical Islamic Terrorist attack on the US Mission in Benghazi on September 11, 2011, played a major role in moving Gaddafi’s weapons from US Ambassador Chris Stevens to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Q’ieda, and ISIS in Syria.

The below listed comments and acts by Obama, reveals his state of mind, and why for 8 years, he refused to properly identify the terrorists killing Americans as “Radical Islamic Terrorists”, why he referred to ISIS as a “JV Team”, and why he refused to authorized the bombing of the Islamic State’s Capital of Raqqa (the Joint Chiefs recommended the strike, in order to decapitate the Islamic State’s leadership):

1) On ABC News Obama referenced—“My Muslim Faith.”

2) Obama wrote that in the event of a conflict—“I will stand with the Muslims.”

3) Obama refused to label the Ft Hood shooter who yelled “Allah Akbar” while he was killing 13 US soldiers as a “Terrorist.”

14) Obama said NASA’s “Foremost Mission” would be to develop an outreach to Muslim communities.

15) In an Islamic Dinner with Muslims, Obama said—“I am one of you.”

16) Obama followed the Muslim custom of not wearing any jewelry (rings/watches) for 8 years during Ramadan.

17) Obama said the Muslim call to worship is “The most beautiful sound on earth.”

18) For 8 years, in the Executive Office Building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, DC, silence was enforced during the five times of
Islamic prayer each day (25 minutes/day, 7 days/week). Prayer rugs and crescent moon symbols were made available in several
areas of the Executive Office Building for Muslims visitors and Muslims working in The White House.

Millions of unprotected Assyrian Christians living in their ancient ancestral homeland of Mesopotamia, on the Plains of Nineveh, and Syrian Christians living in Syria who have practiced their religion since Christ walked the surface of the earth, were butchered by Al Q’ieda, ISIS, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, while Obama ignored their repeated requests for small arms for the self-defense of their families.

Despite the repeated petitions by 56 US Congressmen from both sides of the isle, who pleaded with Obama to provide Syrian and Assyrian Christians with self-defensive small arms weapons, to protect their families from the on-going genocide by ISIS, Obama refused to authorize self-defensive aid. At the same time, Obama was accepting over 900,000 Middle East Muslim refugees, he refused to accept any of the over 300,000 Middle East Christians Refugees who fled from the genocide by “Radical Islamic Terrorist”.

The US Congress must terminate all funding for the UN Middle East and African “Muslin Only” Refugee Program, run by Muslims in the UN—it has been discriminating against Christian Refugees for the last 8 years, and is an ongoing violation of “Freedom of Religion” and US Law.

While the genocide of Christians in the Middle East continued, Obama brought in over 900,000 Middle East and African Muslin Refugees into the US, thru the UN Refugee Relief Program. They were settled in 187 cities throughout the US, at a cost of billions of US tax payer dollars, while Obama prevented the FBI from determining if they had terrorist ties. Obama refused to inform local and state elected government officials, and Federal, State, and Local Law Enforcement Officers where those Middle East and African Muslim Refugees were resettled.

For 8 years, the “Republican” and “Democratic” leaders in Congress, worked closely with Obama and the US Chamber of Commerce to ensure the wide open Southern Border remained open. For those 8 years “Radical Islamic Terrorists”. who have set up terrorist training camps just south of the US/Mexican border, were able to simply walk into the United States thru that wide open southern border.

The FBI has opened over 1000 “Radical Islamic Terrorist” cases in all 50 states, to apprehend and prosecute “Radical Islamic Terrorist” operating in the United States. To date the FBI has disrupted and prosecuted over 100 “Radical Islamic Terrorist” potential attacks within the United States, resulting in the arrests and prosecutions of 180 “Radical Islamic Terrorists.”

Despite the 180 arrests, there have been 93 ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks within the United States by Muslim Refugees from the Middle East and Africa and/or from their off springs; 2/3rd of those attacks occurred in the last 4 years. Those attacks and threats of attacks have been covered up by the left of center liberal media establishment working very closely with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups, and the Obama administration. The attachment details many, but not all of those “Radical Islamic Terrorist” attacks initiated in the United States, that resulted in the death of hundreds of Americans Citizens on US soil.

Please review the below listed article to fully understand the “Step by Step” procedure Obama and Hillary Clinton followed to incubate ISIS “Radical Islamic Terrorists”, that allowed ISIS to grow and gain in strength.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

WND EXCLUSIVE
STEP BY STEP: HOW HILLARY, OBAMA INCUBATED ISIS
Jerome R. Corsi
NEW YORK – By piecing together recently revealed WikiLeaks emails with evidence that has emerged over the past several years, it’s become increasingly clear that President Obama and his secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton in 2011, armed the Free Syrian Army rebels in an effort to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, mirroring a strategy already under way in Libya to help al-Qaida-affiliated militia overthrow Moammar Gadhafi. A consequence of the strategy was the emergence of ISIS out of the loosely coordinated Free Syrian Army coalition as well as the disastrous Benghazi attack in which a U.S. ambassador was murdered.

Various WikiLeaks emails examined by WND indicate the Free Syrian Army was among the first splinter rebel groups Clinton and Obama armed. The Obama administration apparently was hoping to replicate the regime-change strategy in which it armed al-Qaida-affiliated militia in Libya, including Ansar al-Sharia, the group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack at Benghazi.

The WikiLeaks email evidence shows a shift in policy in which Clinton and Obama appear to have decided in 2011 to topple the governments of Gadhafi in Libya and Assad in Syria, even if it meant arming “Radical Islamic Terrorist” groups that traced back to al-Qaida.

As WND reported last week, WikiLeaks emails back up Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s assertion that U.S.-led coalition forces have given support to terror groups, including ISIS in Syria.

The claim derived further support from a recording leaked to the New York Times of Secretary of State John Kerry admitting the Obama administration not only hoped ISIS would depose the Assad regime, it also gave arms to the jihadist army and its allies to carry out the task.

Blumenthal recommends Free Syria Army to Clinton

Hacked emails to Hillary Clinton from longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal that were published in October by WikiLeaks tell the story.

On June 20, 2011, Blumenthal sent a confidential email to Clinton at the State Department that included an article by David W. Lesch, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Trinity University in San Antonio. Lesch argued a strategy of regime change could be effected in Syria if the U.S. could find opposition groups in Syria capable of establishing “a Benghazi-like refuge from which to launch a rebellion and to which aid can be sent.”

In a subsequent confidential email July 24, 2012, Blumenthal further advised Clinton that the “growing success of the rebel forces of the Free Syria Army” caused him to believe the Assad regime was increasingly vulnerable to being toppled.

In an email Feb. 24, 2012, Blumenthal characterized the FSA as “loosely organized and uncoordinated,” noting it was “for the most part, local militias, many of them civilian based, that are simply calling themselves the FSA to appear to be part of a whole.”

Blumenthal commented in the email that the armed resistance to Assad “is not well funded or well armed.”

On Feb. 28, 2012, Jacob Sullivan, a State Department senior policy adviser to Secretary Clinton, forwarded to Clinton an opinion piece published in the New York Times by foreign correspondent Roger Cohen suggesting the strategy Obama and Clinton had used to topple Gadhafi in Libya should be used to bring down Assad in Syria.

“As the Bosnian war showed, the basis for any settlement must be a rough equality of forces. So I say step up the efforts, already quietly ongoing, to get weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Train those forces, just as the rebels were trained in Libya,” Cohen wrote. “Payback time has come around: The United States warned Assad about allowing Al Qaeda fighters to transit Syria to Iraq. Now matériel and special forces with the ability to train a ragtag army can transit Iraq – and other neighboring states – into Syria.”

Then, on Sept. 18, 2012, one week after the Benghazi terror attack, Blumenthal, in a confidential memo, alerted Clinton to the possibility of the FSA military taking over Damascus.

The prospect caused Assad’s wife and close relatives to urge Assad to flee Syria to avoid “the fate of Assad’s former ally Muammar al Qaddafi of Libya, who was captured and killed by rebel forces while attempting to flee his home territory in Sirte.”

Clinton sought to arm Free Syrian Army

In an Aug. 17, 2014, email released by WikiLeaks, Clinton, after her service as secretary of state, suggested to adviser John Podesta: “At the same time, we should return to plans to provide the FSA [Free Syrian Army], with some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian regime.”

Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute, tied the statement to the Obama administration’s plan to equip Syrian fighters, either the Free Syrian Army or “other moderate forces,” to a U.S.-led operation in coordination with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to steer weapons to Syria, “ostensibly to fight both Assad and ISIS.”

McCarthy noted, however, that Clinton’s 2014 memo to Podesta asserted the Saudi and Qatari governments both supported ISIS and other “radical Sunni groups.”

In September 2013, WND reported Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had relied on the work of Elizabeth O’Bagy, a 26-year-old graduate student, to argue in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Obama administration should send weapons to arm the “moderate” Free Syrian Army to oppose the Assad government in Syria.

In that article, WND detailed the extensive lobbying efforts conducted in Washington to advance the FSA as a “moderate group,” despite clear evidence the al-Nusra Front – operating under the FSA umbrella – had been declared a terrorist organization by the State Department; had pledged allegiance to al-Qaida’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and was the group of choice for foreign jihadi fighters pouring into Syria.

Clinton ‘changed sides in war on terror’

WND reported in 2015 the Obama White House and the State Department under the management of Hillary Clinton “changed sides in the war on terror” in 2011 by implementing a policy of facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya attempting to oust Gadhafi, the Citizens Commission on Benghazi concluded in its interim report.

The April 22, 2014, report, “How America Changed sides in the War on Terror,” alleges “the U.S. was fully aware of and facilitating the delivery of weapons to the Al Qaeda-dominated rebel militias throughout the 2011 rebellion.”

The report asserted the agenda of al-Qaida-affiliated jihadis in the region, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other Islamic terror groups represented among the rebel forces, was well known to U.S. officials responsible for Libya policy.

“The rebels made no secret of their Al Qaeda affiliation, openly flying and speaking in front of the black flag of Islamic jihad, according to author John Rosenthal and multiple media reports,” the interim report said. “And yet, the White House and senior Congressional members deliberately and knowingly pursued a policy that provided material support to terrorist organizations in order to topple a ruler who had been working closely with the West actively to suppress Al Qaeda.”

The report concluded: “The result in Libya, across much of North Africa, and beyond has been utter chaos, disruption of Libya’s oil industry, the spread of dangerous weapons (including surface-to-air missiles), and the empowerment of jihadist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The report identified a key al-Qaida operative who played a major role moving U.S. arms into both Libya and Syria as Abdul Hakim Belhaj, (aka Abdallah al Sadeq). Belhaj was a veteran jihad fighter of Iraq and Afghanistan; commander of the al-Qaida franchise militia, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), aka Libyan Islamic Movement for Change; a post-revolution military commander of Tripoli; and the Libyan delegation leader to the Free Syrian Army in late 2011.

In September 2014, WND reported Elizabeth O’Bagy, who had been fired from her job with a Washington think-tank after her exposure by WND as a source for Kerry’s argument that the FSA is a “moderate” rebel force in Syria, had also arranged for McCain a trip to Syria in May 2013 in which senator met with Belhaj, who was then represented as a leader of the FSA.

In November 2013, WND reported trusted Libyan expatriates had claimed Belhaj was at large in Libya. The expatriates identified Belhaj as an al-Qaida operative, noting he was at the top of a list of Libyan terrorists banned by the European Union from obtaining entrance visas and was the principal organizer of the terrorist attack in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2011, in which Ambassador Stevens was murdered.
McCarthy reported Aug. 2 Ambassador Stevens had “moved an enormous shipment of weapons from Benghazi to the Syrian ‘rebels’ in Turkey,” as the Obama administration was working in 2011 to determine which Syrian “rebel” forces should be armed.

McCarthy pointed to a New York Times article in 2012, some three months before the Benghazi massacre, that reported CIA operatives were secretly in Turkey helping the Obama administration to decide which Syrian opposition fighters would receive arms clandestinely from the United States to fight the Syrian government.

The Times further reported the weapons including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons were being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries, including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood, and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

McCarthy further noted that before becoming ambassador, Christopher Stevens was the Obama administration’s official liaison to Gadhafi’s Islamist opposition in Libya, including its al-Qaida-linked groups. Among them were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, with Stevens working directly with Belhaj.

Below is a partial list of Refugees and Radical Islamic Terrorists who have perpetrated Terrorist Attacks against American citizens—the partial list is truly unbelievable, and the Obama administration and the left of center liberal media establishment have done their best to cover up every one of those terrorist attacks for 8 years—it is part of a continuing criminal conspiracy that is damaging the National Security Interest of the United States!!!

The left of center liberal media establishment is working hand in glove with Obama, to covering up the fact that there have been 93 Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11. To date, 100 ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorist plots have been foiled by the FBI, resulting in the arrests of over 180 ISIS Muslim Refugees and Radical Islamic Terrorists by the FBI across the United States, and there are 1000 FBI ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorist cases under investigation in all 50 states. We encourage all American citizens to put pressure on their Congress to pass the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Act, and to get the Republican Leaders in Congress to finally do something after 8 years to protect American citizens and their children from Radical Islamic Terrorists.
The below “partial list” of the Muslim Refugees and Radical Islamic Terrorists who have participated in Jihad killings and attacks against the American citizens since Obama took office—are only listed, because the complete numbers of Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks are just too many, to all be listed here.
There are now over 900 open cases on potential ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorists in all 50 states being prosecuted by the FBI, those terrorist are a percentage of the 900,000+ Muslim Refugees Obama forced fed into 180 cities resettling them throughout the US thru the UN Muslim Refugee Resettlement Program while ignoring FBI warnings that they cannot vet them to determine if they have terrorist ties. Now we find out that Obama had his appointees at DHS scrub clean the data base of hundreds of Radical Islamic Terrorist suspects they maintained records on—that was a conspiracy that damaged the national Security of the United States:
• On January 7, 2016, Aws Mohammad Younis Al-Jayab, a Palestine born Iraqi, was arrested in Sacramento, CA on charges of assisting jihadi organizations.
• In an unrelated case, also on January 7, 2016, Omar Faraj Saeed al Hardan, an Iraqi Refugee, was arrested in Houston, TX on charges of providing material support to ISIS and going thru terrorist training.
• In Philadelphia, PA, a jihadi opened fire on a cop on January 8, 2016. He fired 13 shots and hit the police officer three times, grievously wounding the man.
• On January 11, 2016, Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions said the number of people implicated in radical Islamic terrorist plots in the U.S. has jumped to 113.
• On January 16, 2016, Mohamed Elmi, 31, and Mohamed Salad, 29, both of Calgary,
Canada, were arrested after they invaded the doorway of a neighborhood bar and grievously wounded a 38-year old stranger.

• On February 16, 2016, a court magistrate ruled after hearing the FBI testimony that Khalil Abu-Rayyan, a 21 year old Dearborn, MI man was too much of a threat to public safety and ordered him held without bail. He gets excited by thoughts of beheading Americans, burning people alive and throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings. He’d actually made plans to shoot up a 6,000 member Christians in Detroit, in conversations with an undercover FBI agent.. (If I) can’t go do jihad at the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here.” He also told the agent that “shooting and death make me excited. I love to hear people begging and screaming. … I wish I had my gun.” The FBI claims Abu-Rayyan has since late 2014 used Twitter for “retweeting, liking and commenting” on Islamic State propaganda.
•
On February 12, 2016 a machete wielding assailant known to the FBI, identified as Mohammad Barry, a Somali living in Ohio attacked Jewish and Christian patrons at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, wounding four people. Witnesses said it was carnage. Some of the patrons fought back by throwing chairs. Police later shot and killed Barry after a short chase. Investigators are trying to determine if Barry attacked the Nazareth Restaurant because he thought the owner was Jewish. In actuality, the restaurant is owned by an Israeli Christian.

• On January 7, 2016, Aws Mohammad Younis Al-Jayab, a Palestine born Iraqi, was arrested in Sacramento, CA on charges of assisting jihadi organizations.
•
• On June 12, 21016, Omar Saddiqul Mateen, the son of Afghan refugees, massacred 49 gentle & innocent Americans, and wounded 53 others, in the Orlando night club, Pulse, in the deadliest mass shooting in US history

• In an unrelated case, also on January 7, 2016, Omar Faraj Saeed al Hardan, an Iraqi Refugee, was arrested in Houston, TX on charges of providing material support to ISIS and going thru terrorist training.
• In Philadelphia, PA, a jihadi opened fire on a cop on January 8, 2016. He fired 13 shots and hit the police officer three times, grievously wounding the man.
• On January 11, 2016, Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions said the number of people implicated in radical Islamic terrorist plots in the U.S. has jumped to 113.
• On January 16, 2016, Mohamed Elmi, 31, and Mohamed Salad, 29, both of Calgary,
Canada, were arrested after they invaded the doorway of a neighborhood bar and grievously wounded a 38-year old stranger.
• On February 16, 2016, a court magistrate ruled after hearing the FBI testimony that Khalil Abu-Rayyan, a 21 year old Dearborn, MI man was too much of a threat to public safety and ordered him held without bail. He gets excited by thoughts of beheading Americans, burning people alive and throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings. He’d actually made plans to shoot up a 6,000 member Christians in Detroit, in conversations with an undercover FBI agent.. (If I) can’t go do jihad at the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here.” He also told the agent that “shooting and death make me excited. I love to hear people begging and screaming. … I wish I had my gun.” The FBI claims Abu-Rayyan has since late 2014 used Twitter for “retweeting, liking and commenting” on Islamic State propaganda.
•
On February 12, 2016 a machete wielding assailant known to the FBI, identified as Mohammad Barry, a Somali living in Ohio attacked Jewish and Christian patrons at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, wounding four people. Witnesses said it was carnage. Some of the patrons fought back by throwing chairs. Police later shot and killed Barry after a short chase. Investigators are trying to determine if Barry attacked the Nazareth Restaurant because he thought the owner was Jewish. In actuality, the restaurant is owned by an Israeli Christian

• On May 3, 2015 an attack with gunfire was carried by two Radical Islamic Terrorists followers of ISIS at the entrance to the Curtis Culwell Center, in Garland, TX featuring cartoon images of Mohammad—both were shot and killed by a police officer. Just prior to the attack one of the gunmen posted “May Allah accept us as Mujahedeen”—he wrote both pledged allegiance to “Amirul Mu’mineen”, a likely reference to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
• An immigrant from Ghana, who applied for and received US citizenship, pledged allegiance to ISIS and plotted a terrorist attack on the US soil (June 2015).
• An immigrant from Sudan, who applied and received US citizenship, tried to join ISIS and wage Jihad on its behalf after having been recruited on line(June 2015).
• In November 17, 2015 A Uzbek Muslim refugee in Boise, ID was convicted of plotting to bomb US military bases.
• On August 14, 2015 three Somali Muslims, Mohamud Mohamed, 36, and Osman Sheikh, 31, Abil Teshome, 23, brutally beat and murdered Freddy Akoa, 49 a Christian in Portland, ME. The attack allegedly took place over the span of several hours, in which Akoa suffered cuts and bruises all over his body, a lacerated liver and 22 rib fractures. However, according to the autopsy, Akoa died as a result of blows to his head.
• Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez murdered five US Armed Forces (1 Navy and 4 Marines) in Chattanooga, TN in July 2015. Mohammad was an immigrant brought here by his family from Kuwait at a young age, and who was later approved for U.S. citizenship, who carried out the Islamist attack that killed the 5 military personnel in Chattanooga.
• The Somali refugee who recruited the San Bernardino killers also recruited the jihadist who attacked the Garland, TX “Draw Mohammad” contest in May 2015, fled the United States.
• An Iraqi immigrant, who later applied for and received US citizenship, was arrested for lying to federal agents about pledging allegiance to ISIS and his travel to Syria (May 2015)
• An immigrant from Syria, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, was accused by federal prosecutors of planning to rob a gun store to “go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style.” (April 2015)
• Six Somalian Muslim refugees were arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota for attempting to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS.
• Five Muslim refugees (same family) were arrested in Missouri, Illinois and New York for sending arms and cash to ISIS.
• Five Somali Muslim refugees were charged in July 2014 with fundraising for jihadi groups in Africa.
• On December 14, 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, born to a Muslim African American family, executed two NYC police officers as they sat in their patrol car. Brinsley is reported to have approached the two officers as they were sitting in their patrol car in the notorious crime ridden Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York and began firing rounds into the vehicle before fleeing on foot to the closest subway station where he later committed suicide.
• Two Bosnian Muslim refugee in Portland, Oregon was arrested in November 21, 2014 for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
• On November 4, 2015 18 year old Faisal Mohammad who had a black ISIS flag in his possessions and a terrorist manifesto, stabbed 4 of his fellow student at U C Merced; police had to shoot him to stop his stabbing spree. He had pro-ISIS propaganda on his computer. The FBI said he was self radicalized.
• In San Bernardino in December 2015 two Middle East Radical Islamic Terrorist, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, who said they were ISIS, attackers (immigrants) killed 14 civilians and wounded 21 others, were recruited to their jihad by a Muslim Somali refugee who has now moved to Syria, but continues to recruit Jihadist in America using social media.
• A refugee from Uzbekistan was convicted of providing material support and money to a designated foreign terrorist organization. According to the Department of Justice, he also procured bomb-making materials in the interest of perpetrating a terrorist attack on American soil. (August 2015)
• An immigrant from Albania, who applied for and received Lawful Permanent Resident status, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for giving over $1,000 to terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, and for attempting to join a radical jihadist insurgent group in Pakistan. (August 2015)
• An immigrant from Egypt, who subsequently was granted U.S. citizenship, was charged with providing, and conspiring to provide, material support to ISIS, for aiding and abetting a New York college student in receiving terrorist training from ISIS, and conspiring to receive such training. (August 2015)
• A second Immigrant from India, who is married to a US citizen, who was indicted on charges of conspiring to provide thousands of dollars to Al Q’ieda in the Arabian Peninsula, in order to assist them in their global Jihad, and on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud (November 2015)
• A Kazakhstani immigrant with lawful permanent resident status conspired to purchase a machine gun to shoot FBI and other law enforcement agents if they prevented him from traveling to Syria to join ISIS. (February 2015)
• An immigrant from Pakistan, who entered the United States on a fiancé visa thru Canada, and subsequently became a Lawful Permanent Resident, along with her husband, killed 14 people at a Christmas Party in San Bernardino, CA on December 2, 2015 , and wounded 22 others, in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001.
• A Somali-American was arrested after encouraging several friends to leave the United States and join ISIS, and giving one individual over $200 for their passport application. (December 2015)
• The son of Pakistani immigrants, along with his Pakistan bride, murdered 14 coworkers, and wounded two dozen, in that same terrorist attack. His Pakistani-born father has since been placed on the no-fly list (December 2015).
• A Bosnian refugee, along with his wife and five others, donated money and supplies, and smuggled arms, to terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq. (February 2015)
• An Uzbek refugee living in Idaho was arrested and charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, in the form of teaching terror recruits how to build bombs. (July 2015)
• An immigrant from Saudi Arabia, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, swore allegiance to ISIS and pledged to explode a propane tank bomb on U.S. soil. (April 2015).
• An immigrant from Yemen, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, along with six other men, was charged with conspiracy to travel to Syria and to provide material support to ISIS. (April 2015).
• A Uzbek man in Brooklyn encouraged other Uzbeki nationals to wage jihad on behalf of ISIS, and raised $1,600 for the terror organization. (April 2015)
• An immigrant from Bangladesh, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, tried to incite people to travel to Somalia and conduct violent jihad against the United States. (June 2014)
• In September 30, 2014, Alton Nolan, a proponent of Sharia and suspect Radical Islamic Terrorist, beheaded an employee of Vaughan Foods, and was prevented from beheading a second employee in Moor, Oklahoma.
• An immigrant from Afghanistan, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, and a legal permanent resident from the Philippines, were convicted for “join Al Q’ieda and the Taliban in order to kill Americans.” (September 2014)
• A Somali immigrant with lawful permanent resident status, along with four other Somali nationals, is charged with leading an al-Shabaab fundraising conspiracy in the United States, with monthly payments directed to the Somali terrorist organization. (July 2014)
• A Moroccan national who came to the U.S. on a student visa was arrested for plotting to blow up a university and a federal court house. (April 2014)
• The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; those brothers and their family were Muslim refugees. -The Boston Bombers were granted political asylum and were thus deemed legitimate refugees. The younger brother applied for citizenship and was naturalized on September 11th, 2012. The older brother had a pending application for citizenship. (April 2013)
• A college student who immigrated from Somalia, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, attempted to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. (December 2013)
• On February 18, 2012, two Radical Islamic Terrorists from Pakistan, who later applied for and received US Citizenship, were apprehended trying to detonate a bomb in New York City
• In September 15, 2012, Amine El Khalifi, and al Q’ieda Radical Islamic Terrorist plotted to do a suicide bombing of the US Capital.
• In 2011 Mohammad Alfatlawi a proponent of Sharia Law was charged with the “Honor Killing” of his wife and daughter in Detroit, Michigan.
• In May 4, 2010 Faisal Shahzad conducted a terrorist car bombing plot in Times Square that failed.
• On June 1, 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a convert to Islam, who had gone to Yemen in 2007 and stayed for about 16 months, open fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas US Armed Forces Recruiting Office in a drive by shooting with a rifle, against a group of US Army Soldiers standing in front of the Recruiting Office. He killed Private William Long and wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula.
• On November 5, 2009, Maj Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US Army soldiers and wounded 32 others in Fort Hood while yelling “Allah Akbar” at the top of his lungs—Obama insisted it was simply “Work Place Violence” and not a Radical Islamic terrorist attack by a disciple of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Prior to the shooting, in his previous assignment as an intern and resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center his colleagues and superiors were deeply concerned about his behavior and anti-American comments—but because they were cowered by the Obama’s administration’s warnings and perceived threats to their military standing, that they better be “politically correct’ and not disparage such anti-American comments—nothing was done to drum that Radical Islamic Terrorist out of the US Armed Forces
• In December 2009, the bombing terror plot to kill 290 innocent passengers on a flight from the Netherland to Detroit the Nigerian Radical Islamic Terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutlallab (aka the Underwear Bomber) failed to detonate on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 because the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned, and passengers were able to subdue him until he was arrested.
• Two Al Qaeda members who had killed American soldiers in Iraq were arrested in Kentucky in 2009 – and, both were refugees!

December 7, 2016: The 75th Anniversary of the Sneak Attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Forces of Japan, executed by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s strike plan “Z”, commenced at 7:48 AM Hawaiian Time. The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese fighters, bomber, and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six Japanese aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but the USS Arizona (BB-39) were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight the Imperial Forces of Japan in the WWII. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. In addition 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded. However, important base installations such as the power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light; 29 aircraft and five midget submarines were lost, and 64 servicemen killed. One Japanese sailor, Kazuo Sakamaki, was captured.

In the wake of the attack, 15 Medal Of Honor, 51 Navy Crosses, 53 Silver Stars, 4 Navy and Marine Corps Medals, one Distinguished Flying Cross, four Distinguished Service Crosses, one Distinguished Service Medal, and three Bronze Star Medals were awarded to the American servicemen who distinguished themselves in combat at Pearl Harbor. Additionally, a special military award, the Pearl Harbor Commemorative medal was later authorized for all military veterans of the attack

Japan’s Prime Minister’s Will Visit Pearl Harbor Today

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would travel to Pearl Harbor today, to recognize the 75th Anniversary of Japan’s attack on the home port of the, US Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Prime Minister Abe is the first Japanese leader to visit Pearl Harbor to “pay tribute [and] comfort the souls” of those who died from both countries during World War II. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor “awoke a sleeping giant”. The attack was labeled “A Day of Infamy” by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the next 3 years, 7 months, and 25 days, the US Armed Forces and their Allies in the Pacific Theatre, defeated the Imperial Forces of Japan. On September 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, USMA ’03, USA, representing the Combined Allied Forces, accepted the “Unconditional Surrender” of the Imperial Forces of Japan aboard the USS Missouri (BB-63) in Tokyo Bay.

Pearl Harbor – 75 years on

In the below listed Op Ed, by Admiral James A. Lyons, Jr. USNA ’52, USN (Ret), who was the Commander–in-Chief, of the US Pacific Fleet, and the Senior US Military Representative to the United Nations, exposes the US military personnel who were responsible for failing to alert Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, and Lt. General Walter Short, who was responsible for the defense of Hawaii, of the pending attack by Japan, were accused of dereliction of duty following the attack. Admiral Kimmel was reduced in rank to Rear Admiral, and retired from the US Navy. Lt General Short was reduced in rank to Major General and retired from the US Army. Admiral Lyons recommends in the below listed Op Ed that Rear Admiral Kimmel and Major General Short have their honor, reputations, and ranks restored by Congress.

The 75th anniversary of the Imperial Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will soon be remembered again as a “Day of Infamy.” On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched over 353 aircraft from six carriers, flawlessly executing Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s strike plan “Z” and succeeded in crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

How could the commanders in Hawaii be so unprepared when in Washington both the Army and Navy intelligence organizations had broken key Japanese diplomatic codes, including the high level “Purple” code in which Japan was conducting its peace negotiations with the United States? Whether the Japanese naval code “JN-25” was broken prior to the attack remains unknown.

In their new book, “A Matter of Honor,” by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, the authors provide information never before revealed. The authors make the case for restoring the personal reputation, honor and ranks of the two Pearl Harbor commanders who were unjustly made the scapegoats.

The second new book, “Into the Lion’s Mouth” by Larry Loftis, discusses the most successful British double agent, “Dusko Popov,” the real life inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Popov’s relationship to Pearl Harbor. In short, the Japanese were fascinated by the British surprise airstrike at Taranto, which destroyed the Italian Fleet primarily by dropping torpedoes in relatively shallow water. They prepared questions and passed them to Germany who in turn gave them to Popov. He turned them over to the FBI on his arrival in New York in August 1941. The U.K. raid on Taranto became the blueprint for the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Mr. Loftis contends that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, never turned over the questions to the military or to the president. Former CIA Director William Casey made the same charges in 1988 and blamed Hoover for failing to share the information with the military. However, according to Mr. Summers and Ms. Swan, Hoover did turn over paraphrased versions of the question to military intelligence who failed to recognize the significance of this information.

Of the eight official inquiries, the most biased conducted was by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts shortly following the attack. Neither Adm. Husband E. Kimmel, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, or Lt. Gen. Walter Short, who was responsible for the defense of Hawaii, received any information from the decrypted codes which would have alerted them to the Japanese fleet’s intentions. Yet the Roberts commission declared Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short derelict in carrying their duties and held them solely responsible for the Pearl Harbor disaster. None of the 10 Washington officials authorized to receive the decrypted information was held accountable. Cover up?

The Washington officials authorized to receive the decrypted “Purple” intelligence, referred to as “Magic,” included the Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall; Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark; Chief of Navy War Plans RADM Richmond K. Turner; Brig. Gen. Gerow; head of Army War Plans; heads of both Army and Navy Intelligence, Secretary of War (Army) Stimson; Secretary of Navy Knox; the president and the Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

The president only saw brief summaries of “Magic” decoded information and at times only received verbal briefings. Further, Marshall and Stark at one point denied the president and secretary of State any “Magic” information for four months because they didn’t trust people around them. Of course, one person who did see Magic was Winston Churchill. The U.S. provided three “Purple” machines to the U.K. to facilitate their breaking of the code. Another machine went to the U.S. Army and two went to the Navy. Interesting, one “Purple” machine was sent to the naval station CAST at Cavite in the Philippines for use by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Harold Hart. Astonishingly, none were provided to the Hawaii Commanders Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short. What use MacArthur made of the Purple intelligence is unknown. Further, he was unprepared for the Japanese attack that destroyed our FAREAST Air Force at Clark AFB nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was never held accountable.

One other aspect that is seldom mentioned is that the Dutch Army cryptanalysts had also broken the Japanese diplomatic code “Purple.” According to Brig. Gen. Elliot Thorpe, USA (ret.) when he was the army attaché in Java, Gen. Tec Pooten, CINC of Far East Dutch Army, provided him a decrypted message from Tokyo to the Japanese Ambassador in Bangkok which told of the upcoming attack on Hawaii, Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. After sending four messages about the upcoming attack, Thorpe as he recalled was directed by our War Department to send “no more on this subject.”

“Magic” decrypted information held a wealth of information. There was the “bomb plot” grid message #83 of Sept. 24, 1941, which divided the fleet anchorages in Pearl Harbor into bombing sectors. We also had the Nov. 30, 1941 message to designated Japanese Embassies to destroy their codes, files, etc. Washington cleared officials also had the 14-part message on Dec. 6 1941, the Japanese response to the secretary of State’s Nov. 26 ultimatum, ceasing all negotiations to which President Roosevelt remarked, “This means war.” Yet none of this critical intelligence was passed to the Hawaii Commanders. As an aside, Churchill was getting much of this information as well. We do know it was his goal to involve “isolationist” America in the war.

The three principals that should have been held accountable were Gen. Marshall, Adm. Stark and Adm. Turner, who assumed responsibility for distributing the decrypted information for the Navy. It clearly is time for Adm. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Short to have their honor, reputations and ranks restored. It is a matter of honor for the Navy, Army, and country to correct this terrible injustice.

• James A. Lyons, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.

[Personal note on this: for over 40 years I have been a proponent of the position that FDR withheld information for the purposes of involving the U.S.A. in the war and to get himself out of the Great Depression. The first purpose is self-evident. However, few know that FDR kept the U.S. in the depression for longer than necessary by, among several wrongful acts, allowing the dollar to become the global currency, and by fixing the dollar to gold during this economic crisis instead of letting it float. By 1938, most of Europe was out of the depression as they prepared for war. FDR did not. Instead, this stalwart liberal insisted on domestic policies that included the National Recovery Act, unconstitutional on its face, called the Negro Ruination Act by integrationists. The NRA permitted businesses to fire colored employees before firing white employees, just one of many discriminatory and crony features. JPB]

NEWS RELEASE: Portland City Council Combats High CEO Pay
NEWS RELEASE: Portland City Council Combats High CEO Pay
(December 7, 2016)—Today, Portland, Oregon, became the first jurisdiction in the United States to use the tax code to address the phenomenon of outrageous CEO pay. The City Council passed an ordinance, sponsored by City Commissioner Steve Novick, that requires publicly traded corporations to pay a surtax if they pay their CEO more than 100 times their median worker.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a rule in 2015 requiring public companies to disclose the ratio of the compensation of its chief executive officer to the median compensation of its employees. Companies will begin reporting the data for tax years beginning in January 2017. The new disclosure will help shareholders better evaluate chief executive officer compensation based on performance, and it offers local, state, and federal governments a tool for establishing policies that address increasing ratios of chief executive officer to median worker pay.
“When I first read about the idea of applying a higher tax rate to companies with extreme ratios of CEO pay to typical worker pay, I thought it was a fascinating idea—the closest thing I’d seen to a tax on inequality itself,” Commissioner Novick said.
World renowned economist Thomas Piketty stated in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that “60 to 70%…of the top 0.1% of the income hierarchy in 2000-2010 consisted of top managers’ in large firms.” Piketty goes on to say that “the increase [in inequality in the United States] was largely the result of an unprecedented increase in wage inequality, and in particular the emergence of extremely high remunerations at the summit of the wage hierarchy, particularly among top managers of large firms.”
Novick believes that Piketty’s comments affirm the idea that extreme CEO pay is not just an eye-catching example of, but a major cause of, extreme economic inequality. “Extreme economic inequality is—next to global warming—the biggest problem we have in our society,” said Novick. “The top 1%, and especially the top one-tenth of one percent, have a far larger share of wealth and income than they did forty years ago.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Branko Milanović, a former lead economist at the World Bank and a professor at New York University who specializes in income inequality, reflected on Portland’s surtax: “What I find quite interesting is that it seems [to be] the first tax that targets inequality as such.”
For Milanović, the idea was novel because “it treats inequality as having a negative externality like taxing carbon emissions.”
The surtax will also benefit the city by generating an estimated $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year. Portland’s Revenue Bureau has identified more than 500 publicly-traded firms that do business in the city and therefore will be subject to the tax if their CEO-worker pay ratios are above 100 to 1. The list includes major corporations known for sky-high CEO pay, including Wells Fargo, Walmart and General Electric.
Portland City Council passed the surtax thanks to the support of Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Amanda Fritz. Novick credits Steve Silberstein, a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, and U.S. Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, who first proposed the idea as a California State Senator, for developing the idea for the surtax. Novick also thanks Sarah Anderson from the Institute for Policy Studies for her expert advocacy and support for this proposal.
Without the partnership and innovation of these leaders, adoption of this surtax in Portland wouldn’t have been possible.http://www.portlandoregon.gov/novick/article/620318

[Taxation without representation. This is socialism at its worst. Accordingly, not only can they, and will they, limit top pay, but they already raise minimum pay, next will be YOUR pay. It violates the sanctity of Contracts!]

The nation has had a very serious Voter Fraud problem, going back to the Nixon Kennedy Presidential election of 1960, when Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago was accused of having his Democratic Machine perpetrate “Voter Fraud” in the city of Chicago. The Chicago voting total tipped the state of Illinois into John Kennedy’s win column, and threw the Presidential election to John Kennedy. The Democratic “machine” came up with 8,858 votes from Chicago graveyards and elsewhere to steal the election from Richard Nixon. Even though Richard Nixon was provided with evidence of massive “Voter Fraud” perpetrated by the Chicago Democratic Machine, he refused to contest the election because he didn’t want to create a Constitutional crisis in the United States.

In 1982, Voter Fraud rose its ugly head again un Chicago and resulted in one of the largest “Voter Fraud” prosecutions ever conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. The telltale smoke arose out of one of the closest governor’s races in Illi­nois history; and as for the fire, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago at the time, Daniel Webb, estimated that at least 100,000 fraudulent votes (10 percent of all votes in the city) had been cast. Sixty-five individuals were indicted for federal election crimes, and all but two (one found incompetent to stand trial and another who died) were convicted. CBS’ Local Chicago affiliate reported that 119 dead people have voted 229 times in the last decade, with one dead man voting 11 times.

Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN, he was asked to train the ACORN staff in Chicago after he graduated from Harvard and moved to Chicago. ACORN engage in bullying banks, forcing them to issue risky loans, and ACORN intimidation and disruption businesses. During the 2004 United States Presidential elections, Voter Fraud raised its ugly head again, and the American voters nationally first became acquainted with ACORN, which was funded by the Democratic party. ACORN perpetrated voter fraud in massive amounts that in the 2008 Presidential election of Obama. There were 11 major investigations across the nation involving thousands of potentially fraudulent actions by ACORN employees following the election.

In 2009, ACORN was charged and convicted in Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and California of massive “Voter Registration Fraud.” ACORN simply kept the same people on its employment rolls, and changed the name of the organization in every state in the union, and continued to train its personnel to perpetrate “Voter Fraud.”

From 2008 to 2012, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services funded those same former ACORN organizations, and enabled them to continue registration fraud of Illegal Aliens in many states. They have become very effective in states that issue drivers licenses to Illegal Aliens, so those Illegal Aliens can use their driver’s licenses to obtain Social Security numbers, and then use both the driver’s license and Social Security Cards to register to vote.

In the 2012 presidential election, many Illegal aliens voted, Those former ACORN organizations were funded by Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services from 2012 to 2016 which enabled them to continue the “Voter Registration Fraud.”

Hans Von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation, has maintained that there’s enough “Voter Fraud” to make a difference in a close election. His think tank has compiled 430 cases of “Voter Fraud” that resulted in a conviction or a judge ordering a new election.(WND.com 11/7/16)

Several cases have arisen in just the past week, along with the revelations by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which captured on hidden camera a top Democratic operative engineering wide-scale “Vote Fraud.” (WND.com 11/7/16)

Last Thursday in Pennsylvania, a state the Trump campaign believes it can win, state police raided two offices of a voter registration group in Philadelphia after raiding another office in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, just days earlier. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported police used a warrant seeking forms that could be used to “construct fraudulent voter registration forms” and “completed voter registration forms containing same or similar identifying information of individuals on multiple forms.”

(WND.com 11/7/16)

State officials in Texas are investigating reports of a “vote harvesting” scheme in which as many as 20,000 ballots has been filled in and delivered for people in Tarrant County. (WND.com 11/7/16)

In San Pedro, California, on Saturday, FoxNews.com reported, Jerry Mosna found 83 unused election ballots – all addressed to different people – stacked on the mailbox of an elderly neighbor who lives in a two-bedroom apartment.. (WND.com 11/7/16)

This year Illegal Aliens have been flooding across the wide open southern border, they have been released upon entry in accordance with Obama’s instructions (they should have been quarantined for at least 30 days in accordance with US Federal Immigration Laws, before release). It has been reported that hundreds of thousands of those Illegal Aliens have been registered to vote illegally.

If you click on the below listed link you will be able to watch a video of Obama encouraging Illegal Aliens to vote, and he promises them, in the interview, that there will be no repercussions if they vote illegally—a violation of US Federal Voting Laws. Obama is the first occupant of the Oval Office in 240 years to encourage Illegal Aliens to vote, while assuring them that there will not be any repercussions for voting illegally.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

When multiple supporters sent the below listed link to us we said, no way, even Obama would never say to vote illegally.

But we were wrong.

Barack Obama illegally and openly called on Illegal Aliens to vote in Tuesday’s election——just watch the below listed video when you click on the below listed link.

The Obama administration has proved to be lawless when it comes to US Federal Voting Laws by viewing the below listed link!

They Hillary and Obama have been lying at every turn.

The occupant in the Oval Office lied to get Obamacare passed when he said you can keep your doctor and your insurance.
The occupant of the Oval Office and Hillary lied about Benghazi when they said it was a spontaneous riot about a movie, not terrorism.
The occupant of the Oval Office lied when he said he didn’t know about Hillary’s private illegal server and emails.

The occupant in the Oval Office said I will bridge the gap between black and white Americas.

If an American voter is not drawn to either presidential candidate at the “top-of-the-ticket”, that American voter should seriously review the party platforms of both political parties.

The Democratic and Republican party platforms are as different as night and day, the American voter should vote for the party platform that would best protect the Republic, and our children, if they can’t vote for the candidate.

The Democratic platform is a Socialist Manifesto, it supports open borders, sanctuary cities, the continued entry of Moslem refugees without vetting them to determine if they have terrorist ties, does not support the emergency expenditure to stop the hollowing out of the US Armed Forces, and is the most left leaning anti-American document ever drafted by a US political party in 240 years.

The GOP platform is supportive of rebuilding the strength the US Armed Forces, supports of The Free Enterprise System, strongly supports the precepts of the US Constitution, protects the rights of all Americans under the 2nd Amendment, calls for enforcing US Federal Immigration Laws that Obama has been violating for 8 years, calls for securing the wide open southern border thru which terrorists have been entering the US at will, and supports a medical system that doesn’t discriminate against hard working employed Americans & small business owners.

America is coming precariously close to being a second rate military power; Obama has degraded the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces for 8 years, and forced new & very dangerous Rules of Engagement on the US Armed Forces that have increased combat forces “Killed In Action” by 458% and increased combat forces “Wounded In Action” by 378%.

Hillary Clinton will continue Obama’s policies that have degraded the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces. Hillary was so inept, and over a 9 month period, she could not provide security for a 13 acre sized US Mission in Benghazi, that resulted in the death of 4 Americans, and the Democratic Party wants to turn the security of the nation over to her.

Donald Trump will reverse Obama’s policies that have degraded the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces, will strengthen the US Armed Forces, and reinstall tried and true Rules of Engagement that existed long before 2008 that save the lives of millions of members of the US Armed Forces for over 100 years.

In 2008 when Hillary Clinton made the reset with Russian, the US had 250 more Nuclear Weapons in its stockpile than Russia had.

Since the reset, Russia has increased the Nuclear Weapons in its stockpile to exceed the US Stockpile by more than 400 Nuclear Weapons; Hillary and Obama, intentionally made the US a weaker nuclear power.

Donald Trump will restore the strength and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile, will miniaturize and modernize US nuclear weapons, which have fallen behind the miniaturizing and modernizing of Russia’s and China’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

The United States under Obama, has become morally, economically, spiritually, and militarily weak.

There are very clear identifiable indicators—very easily measurable indicators—that America is no longer the world’s only Superpower, which was the premier position it held in 2008 before Obama was elected to office. The US Army now has less military personnel than it had before WWII (386,000), less ships that the US Navy had before WWI (270 ships from 590 ships), and less Aircraft in the US Air Force than it has ever had (12 wings, when a very minimum of 24 wings are required). There are no longer sufficient spare parts to repair equipment, operating equipment has to be cannibalized to make repairs to other equipment.

Donald Trump will reduce the highest US corporate taxes in the world, so business and individuals will be able to spend more to help stimulate the economy. Mr Trump will also rein in the massive out of control government spending, and reduce government “Fraud, Waste, and Abuse”.

Hillary will dramatically increase taxes, so government can spend more. Hillary will expand government spending, increasing the already unsustainable government debt of $20 Trillion, and will do absolutely nothing about government “Fraud, Waste, and Abuse”.

Donald Trump will expose misuse of capital that persists among the Washington Ruling Political Class and the K Street Washington lobbyists, who take advantage of taxpayers and abuse the expenditure of taxpayer funds.

Hillary Clinton thrives in the company of the Washington Ruling Political Class and works closely with the K Street Washington lobbyists.

Hillary Clinton has no plan to stimulate the economy or provide support the Free Enterprise System that has built the most effective economic engine in the history of mankind.

Donald Trump will use every means possible to stimulate the US economy, will support the Free Enterprise System, will cut the highest business taxes in the world that has been driving businesses out of the country, and will prevent 20 + million Illegal Aliens in the US from taking jobs from 95 million unemployed Americans.

Political Freedom, Economic Freedom, and Religious Freedom”, need to coexist together. If one is taken away, the other two will eventually disappear. Any one of those Freedoms cannot exist without the other two. For 240 years, the genius of America has been that all three Freedoms have survived, but all three Freedoms have been under attack by Obama for 8 years.

Donald Trump fully understands that Religious Freedom has been under attack in the US Military and in the Christian community by Obama, and has spoken about it on the stump. Mr Trump also understands that Economic Freedom has been degraded by Obama’s Socialism (Obama Care and Common Core), and the wide open borders that have created a massive drug economy that does not contribute the GNP. For 8 years Obama has intentionally eroded Political Freedom blocking the use of Voter IDs to verify citizenship, and is supporting massive voter fraud thru programs at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Hillary will continue Obama’s 8 years of attacks on Religious, Economic, and Political Freedom—she will also attack, the rule of law, law enforcement, and right of every American to own a firearm in accordance with the provisions of the Second Amendment.

American citizens understand that the pool of 11 superbly qualified Federal Judges that Mr Trump said he would use, to appoint a new Justice to the Supreme Court, will support Religious, Political, and Economic Freedoms, will rule in accordance with the provisions of the US Constitution, and will support the Second Amendment.

Hillary’s very liberal appointees would attack the provisions of the 2nd Amendment, and will degrade the vestiges of the three freedoms mentioned above.

If you are still concerned about voting for Donald Trump, please review the below listed article; Hillary Clinton is the most inept an dangerous candidate who has ever run for President of the United States.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

“Who is Donald Trump?” The better question may be, “What is Donald Trump?”

The answer? He was created by the Political and Media Establishment and is the answer to average American’s hope and prayer.

Most Trump supporters have simply had it with the Democrat-Socialists and the “Republicans In Name Only (RINOs).” They believe there isn’t any difference between Hillary Rodham and the Washington Political Ruling Class, and only a few cents worth of difference between Hillary Rodham Clinton and some of the Republicans who oppose Donald Trump like the Governor Kasich, Governor Romney, Governor Whitman, Senator Sasse, Senator Graham, Senator Collins, Senator Warner, Glenn Beck, and unfortunately the Bush Family.

Dr. Ben Carson was not an “establishment” candidate, but the Clinton machine that operates in the gutter would have pulverized Dr Carson, and the rightly rebellious Senator Ted Cruz would have been tied up with natural born citizen lawsuits (as might Senator Marco Rubio). Trump supporters figured lightning can strike, Trump can get elected, and he can actually fix things. Nothing has been fixed over the last 8 years. The nation elected a candidate who supported the Moslem Brotherhood, Socialist, and the Radical Islamic Mullahs in Iran in 2008. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their front organizations are in hundreds of key National Security positions throughout the Obama administration, one of the hundreds of hard left Obama appointees, an outright Communist, Van Jones, was forced to resign from his position as Czar for Green Jobs.

Millions of conservatives are justifiably furious. They gave the Republicans control of the House in 2010 and control of the Senate in 2014, and have seen them too often not govern any differently from the dreadful Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. So are those thousands of Republican voters supposed to trust the GOP in 2016? Well they don’t? The outsider Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere, the Republican leaders in the US House and US Senate created Donald Trump. His candidacy was created by years of too many of the Republican leaders in the House and Senate working closely with Pelosi and Reid to pass everyone of Obama’s programs for 8 years—they have betrayed and frustrated millions of disgusted conservative voters, a record number of millions conservative voters.

No reasonable person believes that any of the establishment candidates could have slashed wasteful federal spending, reined in the Federal Reserve, cut burdensome job-killing business regulations, reform the tax code, or eliminate useless federal departments (the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, etc.) or rebuild the US Armed Forces that was hollowed out by Obama over the last 8 years, with absolutely no opposition by the Republican Political Ruling Class.

Even Ronald Reagan was unable to eliminate the Department of Education. Of course he had an unwilling, do-nothing, Democrat Congress. No thinking, reasonable person believes that the nation’s major problems will be solved by Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she is simply the third verse of Obama’s failed domestic and international policies, and his waning swan song to change the United States’ Free Enterprise System that created the most successful economic engine in the history of mankind, into a Socialist State, when Socialism (NAZI National Socialism, Mussolini’s Italian Socialism, Russian’s People Republic Socialism, Castro’s Cuban Socialism, the Eastern Bloc of Nations Socialism, and China’s Socialist State that has shifted to a western business oriented economy)——-Socialism has never been successful over the last 100 years.

Many Americans, and especially Mr Trump’s supporters, have had it with:

· Anyone named Clinton

. Anyone named Romney
· Are very disappointed with anyone named Bush
· Anyone who’s has held political office in Washington for the last 8 years
· Political Correctness
· Illegal Immigration with wide open borders

. The resettlement of over 900,000 Muslim Refugees in 187 US cities, without being vetted by the FBI

. Republican and Democrat members of Congress supporting “Open Border” allowing drugs and terrorist to enter the Republic

. The appointment of liberal judges on the Supreme Court by Obama who have violated provisions of the US Constitution

· Out of control federal spending by an inept and dishonest members of Congress, who are feathering their nests

· A National Debt of $20 Trillion that exceeds the GDP; that increased from $9 trillion in 2008
· Dishonest “official” unemployment percentages, that ignore over 94 million unemployed Americans
· Welfare waste, fraud, and abuse
· Billions of Dollars spent on Illegal Aliens and the resettlement UN Muslim Refugees–millions of Americans are abandoned

. The Social Experiment On Diversity destroying the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces

· People faking disabilities in order to go on the SSDI dole, when their unemployment benefits run out
· Veterans Administration waiting lists, while Obama provides better medical benefits to Illegal Aliens and Moslem Refugees
· TSA airport groping
· The failed ObamaCare Socialist medical program that is destroying small business
· The Federal Reserve’s money-printing schemes
· Wall Street crooks like Democrat Jon Corzine
· Michelle Obama’s vacations
· Michelle Obama’s food police
· Barack Obama’s golf
· Barack Obama’s arrogant and condescending lectures
· Barack Obama’s criticism of America and his program that removed the teaching US History in schools
· Valerie Jarrett close personal relations with the Radical Islamic Terrorist Mullahs in Iran

· FBI Director James B. Comey partisan politics, and betrayal of the hard won ethics of the FBI

· Attorney General Loretta Lynch support for Black Lives Matter, and Hillary Clintons violations of National Security Regulations

. The reduction in the size of the US military to the manning where it stood prior to WWII

. the attack on the provisions of the 2nd Amendment

· Stagnant wages and loss of jobs
· Boys in girls’ bathrooms and showers
. Whiny, spoiled college students who can’t even place the Civil War in the correct century

… and that’s just a short list.

Trump supporters, including many Democrats, believe that “no” Democrat will ever address these issues, and that very few RINO Republicans will have the courage to address them as well. Trump is their “screw you, Hillary Rodham Clinton” and “do to little” Republicans” The more the talking head political pundits insult Trump’s patriotic supporters, the more supporters that Donald Trump gains. The only pundits who seem to understand what is going on are Democrats Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell and Republican John LeBoutillier. America does not need a tune-up at the same old failed Democrat garage. It needs a new engine installed by experts at fixing things like Donald Trump.

Maybe Trump is not a mechanic, but he knows where to find the best ones to work in his garage. He won’t hire his brother-in-law or someone to whom he owes a political favor to, like Hillary Clinton would; he will appoint or hire someone who lives and breathes cars and knows how to fix things.

The political “elite” bellow, “How dare they revolt!”. Well, the real American Citizens are revolting, and the Democrats and the Republican Political Ruling Class (RINOs) had better get used to it.

“Trump will hand the election to Clinton!” Now that is what the Karl Rove, George Will, and the Bill Kristol types want you to believe. Just as the leftist media elitists eagerly promoted McCain and Romney in 2008, and 2012, believing they would lose to Obama.

Clinton would not work to restore America ‘s greatness but merely hasten the collapse of a massively in-debt nation. A nation cannot survive with open borders (THE US IS THE ONLY NATION IN THE WORLD WITH OPEN BORDERS—even Mexico does not have open Borders); a nation cannot survive a foolishly-generous and fraudulent welfare system.

No nation can survive the hollowing of the US Armed Forces – and Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn’t care about that. She and the Democrats only care about getting votes.

The United States simply cannot continue on the path it has been on for the last 8 years—that is exactly what Hillary intends to do. The system will collapse if it continues down the same rode it has been on for the last 8 years. At some point it will be destroyed by its debt and loss of its guaranteed freedoms.

Yes, Trump sometimes acts like a bull in a china shop, but the truth is that the borders “need” to be sealed; the American people cannot afford to feed, house, and clothe the 600,000 new Muslim Refugees that Hillary plans to bring into the United States from dangerous terrorist states in the world. ISIS has repeatedly stated that they intend to infiltrate their combat trained terrorists into the United States among the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Refugees being resettled in187 cities throughout the United States; the world is at war with Radical Islamists Terrorists, and Obama and Hillary won’t even identify the threat.

Is Trump the perfect candidate? No. Neither was Ronald Reagan. But unless America seals its borders, eliminate Sanctuary Cities, and prevents Illegal Aliens from entering the US as America did for decades from 1924 to 1965, all other issues will be irrelevant, and the America we once knew will be destroyed by the Leftists and Socialist running Hillary’s campaign. Over the last 8 years there has been 87 terrorist attacks in the United States, and the FBI has over 1000 open cases investigating terrorist threats by ISIS Radical Islamic Terrorists in all 50 states.

One terrorist blowing up a bridge or a tunnel could kill thousands. One jihadist poisoning a city’s water supply could kill tens of thousands. One electromagnetic pulse attack from a single Iranian nuclear device could kill tens of millions of Americans. Faced with those dangerous threats, most Americans probably don’t care that Trump relied on eminent domain to grab up a final quarter acre of property for a hotel, or that his CPA’s employed Federal Income Tax Regulations to minimize his tax bill, as hundreds of millions of Americans minimize their own tax bills each year, when they file their annual federal income taxes.

While Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s greatest fear seems to be an American disrespecting Muslim Refugees, most Americans are more worried about being gunned down or knifed to death in a shopping mall by a Radical Islamic Terrorist

The Washington Ruling Political Class, both Democrats and Republicans, are scared to death that Donald Trump will win, but not because they believe he will harm the nation. They are afraid he will upset their taxpayer-subsidized apple carts, the mother’s milk of the Democrat party and the Republican financial support by lobbyists on K Street. While Obama threatens to veto legislation that spends too little, they worry that Trump will veto legislation that spends too much money that US Treasury simply doesn’t have.

You can be certain that if Hillary wins in November 2016, her cabinet positions will be filled with the same failed politically connected Washington Ruling Political Class currently in power. The washed-up has-beens of the Bill Clinton will be back, or Barack Obama Moslem Brotherhood members and leftists administrations will remain in charge.

If Hillary is elected, the big-bank hacks from Goldman Sachs, Hillary’s benefactors, will continue to call the shots. And America will continue her disastrous economic decline and the loss of precious liberties given to all American Citizens by the Founding Fathers—————————– precious liberties no other democracies has ever had in history. This is the most important election in US History.

If the Washington Political Ruling Class wins—–America and you will lose.

Commissioner, I’ve been a season pass holder at Yankee Stadium, Yale Bowl and Giants Stadium. I missed the ’90-’91 season because I was with a battalion of Marines in Desert Storm. 14 of my wonderful Marines returned home with the American Flag draped across their lifeless bodies. My last conversation with one of them, Sgt Garrett Mongrella, was about how our Giants were going to the Super Bowl. He never got to see it.

Many friends, Marines, and Special Forces Soldiers who worked with or for me through the years returned home with the American Flag draped over their coffins.

Now I watch multi-millionaire athletes who never did anything in their lives but play a game, disrespect what brave Americans fought and died for. They are essentially spitting in the faces and on the graves of real men, men who have actually done something for this country beside playing with a ball and believing they’re something special! They’re not! My Marines and Soldiers were!

You are complicit in this!

You’ll fine players for large and small infractions but you lack the moral courage and respect for our nation and the fallen to put an immediate stop to this.

Yes, I know, it’s their 1st Amendment right to behave in such a despicable manner. What would happen if they came out and disrespected you or the refs publicly?

I observed a player getting a personal foul for twerking in the end zone after scoring. I guess that’s much worse than disrespecting the flag and our National Anthem. Hmmmmm, isn’t it his 1st Amendment right to express himself like an idiot in the end zone?

Why is taunting not allowed yet taunting America is OK? You fine players for wearing 9-11 commemorative shoes yet you allow scum on the sidelines to sit, kneel or pump their pathetic fist in the air. They are so deprived with their multi-million dollar contracts for playing a freaking game! You condone it all by your refusal to act. You’re just as bad and disgusting as they are. I hope Americans boycott any sponsor who supports that rabble you call the NFL. I hope they turn off the TV when any team that allowed this disrespect to occur, without consequence, on the sidelines. I applaud those who have not.

Legends and heroes do NOT wear shoulder pads. They wear body armor and carry rifles. They make minimum wage and spend months and years away from their families. They don’t do it for an hour on Sunday. They do it 24/7 often with lead, not footballs, coming in their direction. They watch their brothers carted off in pieces not on a gurney to get their knee iced. They don’t even have ice! Many don’t have legs or arms. Some wear blue and risk their lives daily on the streets of America. They wear fire helmets and go upstairs into the fire rather than down to safety. On 9-11, hundreds vanished. They are the heroes.

I hope that your high paid protesting pretty boys and you look in that mirror when you shave tomorrow and see what you really are, legends in your own minds. You need to hit the road and take those worms with you!

Number Six: We Are Going To Suspend The Issuance Of Visas To Any Place Where Adequate Screening Cannot Occur

Number Seven: We will ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported

Number Eight: We will finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tracking system.

Number Nine: We will turn off the jobs and benefits magnet.

Number Ten: We will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers

The above listed 10 immigration policies are in support of US Federal Immigration Laws passed by Congress and signed into law by a US President.

Donald Trump is the first Republican Presidential candidate, since Governor Ronald Reagan ran for President, whose policies are aimed at putting 360 million American citizens first, especially the 94 million unemployed American; Mr Trump is not proposing immigration policies that are in the best interest of 20 million Illegal Aliens, and detrimental to 360 million American citizens.

Mr Trump is not in agreement with the Republican leadership in Congress, and the American Chamber of Commerce, who have been working very closely with the Democrat leadership in Congress for 8 years, betraying the best interest of American citizens by intentionally keeping the southern border wide open.

Congressional leaders, by their refusal to seal the wide open southern border, are responsible for permitting the entry of terrorists, drugs, white slavery traffickers, weapons smugglers, hundreds of thousands of Central American children with infectious diseases (TB, whooping cough. measles, mumps, scarlet fever, Zinke virus, etc.), millions of Illegal Aliens from Mexico, and hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East who are simply walking into the US.

For 8 years, Obama has tied the hands of the US Border Patrol and ICE Agents, preventing them from enforcing the US Federal Immigration Laws they were sworn to uphold. Yet for 8 years, the Republican leaders in Congress have not charged Obama’s appointees at DHS with violating US Federal Immigration Laws, or tried to put pressure on them to cease, by employing the power of the purse to put pressure on them.

Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies
September 1, 2016 12:12 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.

While this group comprised quite different thinkers, they mostly agreed that reality was socially constructed and arbitrarily defined by the language of those in power.

In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their own race, class, and gender privilege. You can see how thoroughly popular culture has picked up this mostly banal relativist observation and transformed it into “the Truth”—and why today we assume that lying is simply a narrative, not a window into one’s character.

Relativist slogans abound (e.g., “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”). “Hands up, don’t shoot” was never uttered by Michael Brown, who was not an innocent “gentle giant” but a strong-armed robber who sought to take a policeman’s gun and then charged at the cop. But since his fictitious last utterances should be true, therefore they are and, presto! became the slogan of Black Lives Matter.

In the opposite fashion, there is to be no such thing as Black Lives Matter protestors calling for frying police or killing cops, since negation of the truth serves a far more noble purpose than would confirmation.

Orwell was onto the game far earlier than the French postmodernists. He rightly saw it as a postwar pathway of the Left to assuming and keeping power: What was written on the barn wall on Monday as an absolute commandment was crossed out and replaced on Tuesday, in the fashion that the Soviet Union used to airbrush out sudden enemies of the people from all past pictorial records. Who knew what the party line would be by Wednesday? What frightened Orwell was not so much lying British industrialists or celebrities, but officers of the state who sought to dismiss the idea of the truth itself and justify the dismissal on ideological grounds.

“People’s Republic” after 1946 usually meant that the Communist country in question was never a republic or ratified by a vote of the people. “Sanctuary cities” today have neither the legal right nor the moral weight to offer exemption from federal immigration law. They do not serve any purpose other than self-interested “nullification” of the law in the fashion of 1850s Confederate states that arbitrarily declared federal statutes null and void in their jurisdictions. We know how that construct ended up.

Gender is now defined not by biology, but by culture or suspect patriarchically constructed norms. “Undocumented migrant” replaces “illegal alien” even as those who crossed illegally into the U.S. never had any documents to begin with, were foreign nationals, and were migrants going into the U.S., not mere directionless travelers.

Both Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill are Native Americans because they say they are. To question them on the basis that neither has any proven Indian ancestry is simply to offer a competing narrative, and one driven by racism, not their sort of altruism.

If Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King reconstruct themselves as black Americans, then their “stories” are as legitimate as any others, given their progressive agendas and their antitheses to the white male power structure.

When Hillary falls into her phony black patois to talk down to African-American audiences, in an accidental caricature of a snooty suburbanite trying to seem cool or authentic, she is no more false than she was earlier in her Annie Oakley incarnation of 2008, when she quaffed boilermakers and bowled to appeal to Obama’s despised clingers. All these are mere narrative moments, but disturbing evidence that she cheaply peddles identities for votes.

We claim there is no such thing as “truth,” as assertions gain credulity only by the degree of wealth and influence behind them (white, male, Christian heterosexuals usually are the bogeymen who establish self-interested “standards” of accuracy and fidelity). So fables in service to a progressive cause are not lying, as they would be if in league with reactionary forces.

Barack Obama can make up narratives about under-appreciated Islamic catalysts for the Western Renaissance or Enlightenment in his Cairo Speech because such mythmaking serves a noble cause of stopping “Islamophobia” and thus deserves the artificial currency of “truth.” Obama himself can invent large chunks of his “autobiography” and it is neither a lie nor a fable, given that his principled intent was to enlighten us about the burdens of growing up as the Other.

Lying for a Brian Williams or plagiarism for a Doris Kearns Goodwin or Fareed Zakaria can be passed off as the shoddy work of subordinates, or “misremembering,” or symptomatic of too full a schedule (not egoism, laziness, or efforts at career enhancement), given that all serve the progressive gods.

In 2012 the progressive future of the country hinged on the reelection of Barack Obama, so naturally ensuring that the imploding Middle East was quiet and that al-Qaeda was somnolent demanded a “truth” that an obscure videomaker and Islamophobic bigot had enraged otherwise peace-loving Muslims and incited them to burn down our consulate in Benghazi — an isolated act that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

If that narrative meant that National Security Adviser Susan Rice had to lie five times on Sunday talk shows, or Hillary Clinton had to deceive the families of the Benghazi dead, or Barack Obama’s Justice Department had to jail Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on a trumped-up old probation charge, then the ends of an Obama reelection more than outweighed the unethical means of achieving it. In each case, “conflicting narratives” or the “fog of war” made the idea of one absolute truth absurd. Who is to say whether $400 million in nocturnal cash transfers to the Iranians for hostages is, or is not, “ransom”?

Almost everything Hillary Clinton has said about her current scandals is a lie: No other secretary of state used a personal server; Colin Powell was certainly not her model for lawbreaking; she really did send and receive classified materials that she at the time knew were classified; she did not have lawyers examine all of her personal e-mails that she destroyed; they were not mostly about Chelsea and yoga; she did not accurately inform authorities of the actual number of her personal e-mails; there was no firewall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation; rich individuals did meet with the secretary of state in a fashion that they would otherwise not have been able to, had they not donated vast amounts of money. And on and on. Again, all lies, but lies that in postmodern culture are merely competing progressive narratives that translate into the vulgar media as “Who is to say what pay-to-play actually is?”

Did anyone care that progressive Hillary long ago lied about her rigged $1,000 cattle-future investment beating 34 trillion to 1 odds to earn her $100,000, or her supposed foray into a combat zone in Serbia? Clinton’s lies, past and present, are fobbed off as either fantasies of right-wing conspiracists, who hope to derail her progressive agenda, or as psychodramas of a struggling progressive couple trying to do good. Either that, or they are minor problems of communication, or were courageous stances taken to advance the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, and the children.

The problem with the Clintons and all postmodern liars goes back to Epimenides’ ancient paradox of the Cretan liar: “All Cretans are liars.” Are we then to believe that the Cretan Epimenides was lying when he insisted that all Cretans (like himself) lie? Were Cretans, then, liars or not? Was Hillary lying when she set up the private server, when she explained away her criminal behavior, or when she insisted she had not lied about her prior lying about lying?

Postmodernist Hillary, however, does believe in absolute truth when it is a matter of checks to the Clinton Foundation not bouncing and aviation fuel being purchased for private jets. Postmodernists do not believe that truth exists for others in the abstract; but for themselves it most certainly does and advantageously so in the concrete.

The danger to democracy is never from the bad liars who patently fabricate for self, but from the sophisticated and progressive good liars who lie that their untruth is truth because it was all made up for us.

Dick Morris is a nationally recognized political campaign adviser, analyst and author. He was the senior political adviser to Bill Clinton before and after his occupation of the White House. He was campaign manager of Clinton’s 1996 re-election, and the architect of his successful “triangulation” rhetorical ruse. Clinton’s communications director George Stephanopoulos said of Morris, “No single person had more power over [Bill Clinton].”

This week, in a message entitled “What Bill Left Out, Morris corrected the record regarding Clinton’s glowing remarks about Hillary Clinton, her personal attributes and professional achievements. Morris’s insights into the Clintons are priceless.

What follows is a transcript of Morris’s comments:

“Bill Clinton talked at length about Hillary’s idealistic work in college and law school, but he omits that she was defending the Black Panthers who killed security guards; they were on trial in New Haven. She monitored the trial while she was in law school to find evidence that could be grounds for reversal in the event they were convicted.

“That summer she went to work for the True-Haft (SP) law firm in CA, headed by True Haft who is the head of the CA Communist Party and that’s when she got involved with Saul Alinsky, who became something of a mentor for the rest of her life.

“Then Bill says that she went off to Massachusetts and he went to Arkansas, and eventually Hillary followed her heart to join him in Arkansas. He omits that she went to work for the Watergate Committee and was fired from that job for taking home evidence and hiding documents that they needed in the impeachment inquiry. Then she took the DC Bar exam and flunked it. She went to Arkansas because that is the only bar exam she could pass.

“He talked about how in the 1970’s she took all kinds of pro-bono cases to defend women and children. In her memoirs, she cites one which was a custody case and that’s it. In fact, in 1975 she represented a guy accused of raping a 14-year-old girl and got him off by claiming the girl had had fantasies of sex with an older man. In 1980 she gave an interview about it and she joked that she knew the guy was guilty but got him off anyway.

“Then Bill discusses Hillary’s legal career at the Rose Law firm. He doesn’t mention that she made partner when he was elected governor and was only hired when he got elected as attorney general.

“He makes as if it was a public service job — it wasn’t. Her main job was to get state business, and she got tens-of-millions of dollars of state business, then hid her participation and the fees by taking an extra share of non-state business to compensate for the fees on state business that she brought in. Her other job was to call the state banking commissioner any time one of her banks got into trouble to get them off.

“Bill speaks at length how Hillary was a mother, juggling career and family, taking Chelsea to soccer games and stuff — that’s nonsense. Hillary was a mother but Chelsea in the Arkansas governor’s mansion had a staff of nannies and agents to drive her around and people to be with her, and Hillary didn’t have to bother with any of that. All of that was paid for by the state.

“He says she became the warrior in chief over the family finances and that was true, and the result is she learned how to steal.

“She accepted a $100,000 bribe from the poultry industry in return for Bill going easy on regulating them, despite new standards. Jim Blair, the poultry lobbyist, gave her $1,000 to invest in the Futures Market and lined up seven to eight other investors and their winnings were all deposited into Hillary’s account. She made $100,000 in a year and she was out. That essentially was a bribe.

”[She did] a phony real-estate deal for Jim McDougal and the Madison Bank to deceive the federal regulators by pretending someone else was buying the property. She was called before a grand jury in 1995 about that but, conveniently, the billing records were lost, couldn’t be found and there wasn’t proof that she worked on it.

“Bill talks about her work on the health care task force but doesn’t say the reason it didn’t pass was the task force was discredited because the meetings were all held in secret. A federal judge forced them open and fined the task force several hundred thousand dollars because of their secrecy.

“He says that after the health care bill failed in 1994, Hillary went to work on adopting each piece of it piecemeal — mainly health insurance for children.

“That is completely the opposite of the truth. The fact is when that bill failed, I called Hillary and I suggested that she support a proposal by Republican Bob Dole that we cover children, and she said, ‘We can’t just cover one part of this. You have to change everything or change nothing.’ Then in 1997 when I repeated that advice to Bill Clinton, we worked together to pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I found a lot of the money for that in the tobacco settlement that my friend Dick Scruggs was negotiating.

“Then Bill extols her record in the U.S. Senate. In fact, she did practically nothing. There were seven or eight bills that she introduced that passed; almost all of which were symbolic — renaming a courthouse, congratulating a high school team on winning the championship. There was only one vaguely substantive bill, and that had a lot of co-sponsors of whom Hillary was just one.

“Then he goes to her record in the State Department and manages to tell that story without mentioning the word Benghazi, without mentioning her secret emails, without mentioning he was getting tens of millions — $220 million in speaking fees in return for favorable actions by the State Department.

“Also totally lacking in the speech was anything about the war on terror — terror is a word you don’t hear at the Democratic Convention.

“Bill says that Hillary passed tough sanctions on Iran for their nuclear program. The opposite is true.

“Every time a tough sanction bill was introduced by Senators Menendez or Kirk, Hillary would send Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman to Capital Hill to testify against it and urge it not to pass, and it was over Hillary’s objections that those sanctions were put into place.

(Also see Morris’s comments after Clinton’s DNC acceptance speech. “Its strategy and message will be interdicted by reality at every turn. … She basically has no message. … Her entire campaign is, ‘I’m a woman and I am running against Donald Trump. … She began her speech by saying let’s compromise and work together. Is there any woman in the world less likely to compromise?”)

For four years, while I was a Midshipman matriculating at the US Naval Academy, I was a member of the “Working Honor Committee”, I was on working committee with battalion representatives from throughout the Brigade of Midshipmen to study issues that might affect the “Honor Concept”, and make recommendations for consideration by the Executive Department.

“HONOR” is the bedrock of a human being’s character. The below listed articles speaks volumes about a young US Marine Captain whose steadfast actions, regardless of consequences, embodied his true sense of “HONOR”

This dissertation on “HONOR” has nothing to do with gender, party affiliation, ideology, or policy. This is as much an analysis of character and judgement, and how it affects personal “HONOR”

It is not just about Hillary Clinton’s “character and judgement”, it’s also about the “character and judgement ” of the Attorney General, the Occupant of the Oval Office, and the most importantly “judgement” of the American people in the most important election in 240 years.

As outlined in the below listed article, you will understand why Hillary Clinton is the antithesis of the impressive young US Marine Captain that the article is about.

Hillary has repeatedly proven by her responses over the last 40 years that she is a serial liar—–in her responses to questions about Benghazi——White Water——Vince Foster——the transmission of over 2200 classified messages on an unclassified server. Hillary repeated lied to the parents of the 4 dead Americans murdered during “The Battle of Benghazi” while she stood within close proximity to the caskets of those dead Americans—-and how she has repeatedly lied to the American people about who prosecuted the attack on a US Mission in Benghazi.

From September to November 2012 election, Hillary kept repeating that the attack was the result of a peaceful demonstration against a U-tube video that went bad, in order to mislead the American voters before the Presidential election of 2012. Yet on the night of the attack, Hillary told her daughter, that the attack was perpetrated by a terrorist like organization.

She has continued to lie to the press, the Congress, the American people, and the families of the 4 deceased Americans, up to the present day, by repeating the outright lie, that no military relief could not have been sent to save the lives of the 4 dead Americans.

Hillary has told many more lies over the past 40 year than cannot be relayed here, and even got fired as a staffer by the Joint Congressional Committee investigating President Nixon for possible impeachment, because of Hillary’s lying, but the left of center liberal media establishment has never called her on any of her serial lies.

Anyone who lies to the parents of deceased American combat personnel, must be precluded from ever serving in any federal office, especially in the office of the President of the United States.

Hillary is responsible for the death of four courageous Americans, who were easily murdered by Radical Islamic Terrorists during “The Battle of Benghazi”, because Hillary refused to provide them with adequate security in response to their repeated request for additional security over a 9 month period—12 personal requests were made directly to Hillary by the deceased Ambassador—-they were repeatedly ignored Hillary.

Electing Clinton would mean the security and intelligence agencies of the United States will have abandoned, holding people accountable for grievous errors of integrity, responsibility, judgement, and for repeatedly committing high crimes against the United States.

What we already know about Hillary’s security infractions should disqualify her from “ANY” government position that requires the transmission of critical information, to a mission’s success, as outlined in US Federal Law, Title 18, Section 2017 listed below. But beyond that, the way Hillary has repeatedly responded to being found out for violating federal security laws is a criminal offense— she has dismissed its importance, claiming ignorance, blamed others—by her actions over the last four years, Hillary has demonstrated that she lacks even the slightest degree of integrity.

The way Hillary has responded to her violation of security regulations, “indicts” her beyond anything any FBI investigation of her criminal actions will ever reveal.

The above listed elements reveal Hillary’s true character and her poor judgement———the saddest thing is that so many in America seem not to understand her egregious actions, that is because of the cover the left of center liberal media establishment has provided for her

Anyone who destroyed 30,000 messages while she was Secretary of State, an action that is an outright violation of Federal Law, while at the same time she transmitted 2200 + SECRET, TOP SECRET, TOP SECRET (SCI), and 25 sensitive COMPARTMENTED messages that the American people will never be allowed to see, on an unclassified server in her home, should be indicted for “High Crimes” against the United States.

U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2017
(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.”

It explicitly states “shall forfeit their office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

We encourage you to compare Hillary to the Honorable US Marine Captain in the below listed article.

Hillary’s commitment is only to her endless ambition, she is a serial liar with poor judgement, has absolutely “NO HONOR”, and would continue with serial lies to the American people, if she ever ascended to the Presidency.

Copyright 2016, Capt. Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. This material can only be posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without permission from the author

When I hear people say Clinton emails don’t matter, I remember a young Marine captain who owned up to his career-ruining mistake.

Apologists for Hillary Clinton’s alleged criminal mishandling of classified documents say that it doesn’t matter, that she really did nothing wrong, or nothing significant. But the real question is not so much what she did as how she has responded to being found out.

Once during the mid-1960s when I was on active duty in the Marine Corps, I was the air liaison officer for a battalion of Marines aboard 11 ships in the Mediterranean. As the air officer and a senior captain, I had a rotating responsibility for the nuclear code book, kept in the safe in the operations room of the lead amphibious squadron command ship. I shared that duty with another captain, a squared away young man, liked by all he commanded and the son of a very high-ranking Marine.

On the day our ships were leaving the Mediterranean, we met the new amphibious squadron near Gibraltar and made preparations to transfer security codes and other sensitive material to the incoming Marine battalion. The young captain was on duty and went to the operations office to pick up the code book. He was alone in the office. He removed the code book and placed it on the desk while closing the safe. In a rushed moment, he stepped across the passageway to retrieve something he needed from his quarters.

Seconds later, he stepped back into the operations office and found the operations sergeant having just entered, looking down at the code book.

Against all regulations, the code book had been out of the safe and unattended. It mattered not that it was unattended for only seconds, that the ship was 5 miles at sea, or that it was certain no one unauthorized had seen the code. The captain could have explained this to the operations sergeant. He could have told the sergeant that he “would take care of it.” He could have hinted that his high-ranking dad could smooth it over.

But the Marine Corps’ values are “HONOR”, courage and commitment. “HONOR” is the bedrock of our character. The young captain could not ask the sergeant to betray his duty to report the infraction, no matter how small. Instead, the captain simply said, “Let’s go see the colonel.”

That captain had wanted to be a Marine officer all of his life. It was the only career he ever wanted. When he reported the incident to the colonel, he knew he was jeopardizing his life’s dream. But he did it.

The results went by the book. The amphibious squadron stood down. Military couriers flew in from NATO. The codes were changed all over Europe. The battalion was a day late in leaving the Mediterranean. The captain, Leonard F. Chapman III, received a letter of reprimand, damaging his career. He stayed in the corps and died in a tragic accident aboard another ship.

I saw some heroic acts in combat in Vietnam, things that made me proud to be an American and a Marine. But that young captain stood for what makes our Corps and our country great.

Clinton is the antithesis of that young captain, someone with “NO HONOR”, little courage and commitment only to her endless ambition. This has nothing to do with gender, party affiliation, ideology or policy. It is a question of character — not just hers, but ours.

Electing Clinton would mean abandoning holding people accountable for grievous errors of integrity and responsibility. What we already know about her security infractions should disqualify her for any government position that deals in information critical to mission success, domestic or foreign.

But beyond that, her responses to being found out — dismissing its importance, claiming ignorance, blaming others — indict her beyond anything the investigation can reveal.

Those elements reveal her character. And the saddest thing is that so many in America seem not to care.

Phillip Jennings is an investment banker and entrepreneur, former Marine Corps pilot in Vietnam and Air America pilot in Laos. He is the author of two novels and one non-fiction book.

[I have been recommending books on various subjects for over 30 years, now. I do this because I often find myself in disagreement with those who think that they are entitled, or because as an attorney, I am advocating a position or cause for which I have been hired to argue. This blog has as its first posting, an essay on the climate change hoax. Elsewhere are two postings on petrochemicals primarily because over 95% if everything around us has or requires a distilled petrochemical in its making or as an integral component. Plastic, tar, asphalt, paint, electricity, aspirin, clothing, &c., all require some form of petrochemical as a component either directly or in its manufacturing process. Hillary, Barry, and Bernie notwithstanding, try living without it all.

There are several posts on economics. A point not made in them is that of John Maynard Keynes’ biography. Keynes’ data source is the XIXth Century. His basis does not include the common use of electricity and, in fact, predates The Great Depression and commonplace birth control. His theories have all been debunked by the likes of Hazlett, Hayek, Freidman, von Mises, et al.

There are several more original posts mixed in with those by others whom I think it worth your time to read and contemplate. The conclusions are mine, but the source material led me to those conclusions.

My point in this prologue, is that there is a post of a recommended reading list. I have not updated it since its posting, but it is still valid and from which most of my work originates. Leffler’s works on petrochemicals, Solomon’s on climate change, Hayek & von Mises on economics, Sun Tzu on war & business, Foote’s on The War of 1861, and so many others.

A book not on the list, but which I have been recommending for years, is Thomas Sowell’s, Ph. D., “The Vision of the Anointed; Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”. I have posted excerpts on the blog, and now choose to add another. Barry, Hillary, and Bernie at the top of the heap are screaming about income inequality and how unequal it is. I now accent Dr. Sowell’s opinion by quoting from his above noted work, pp 211-213.

I cannot strongly enough recommend his works.

Posted 20 May 2016

BTW, today’s TWSJ p 11 has an op-ed on minimum wage which falls right into this discussion.]

“INCOME DISTRIBUTION”

Despite a voluminous and fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that income is not distributed: It is earned. People paying each other for goods and services generate income. While many people’s entire income comes from a salary paid to them by a given employer, many others collect individual fees for everything from shoe shines to surgery, and it is the sum total of these innumerable fees which constitutes their income. Other income is distributed from a central point as social security checks, welfare payments, unemployment compensation, and the like. But that is not how most people get most income.

To say that “wealth is so unfairly distributed in America,” as Ronald Dworkin does,43 is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.

If one believes that income and wealth should not originate as they do now, but instead should be distributed as largess from some central point, then that argument should be made openly, plainly, and honestly. But to talk as if we currently have a certain distribution result A which should be changed to distribution result B is to misstate the issue and disguise a radical institutional change as a simple adjustment of preferences. The word “distribution” can of course be used in more than one sense. In a purely statistical sense, we can speak of the “distribution” of heights in the population, without believing someone in Washington decides how tall we should all be and then mails out these heights to different individuals. What we cannot do, either logically or morally, is to shift back and forth between these two very different conceptions of distribution. Newspapers are distributed in one sense – they are sent out from a printing plant to scattered sites to be sold to readers – but heights are distributed only in the other sense.

Those who criticize the existing “distribution” of income in the United States are criticizing the statistical results of systemic processes. They are usually not even discussing the economic fate of actual flesh-and-blood human beings, for the economic positions of given individuals vary greatly within a relatively few years. What is really being said is that numbers don’t look right to the anointed – and that this is what matters, that all the myriad purposes of the millions of human beings who are transacting with one another in the marketplace must be subordinated to the goal of presenting a certain statistical plateau to anointed observers.

To question the “fairness” or other index of validity of the existing statistics growing out of voluntary economic transactions is to question whether those who spent their own money to buy what they wanted from other people have a right to do so. To say that a shoe shine boy earns “too little” or a surgeon “too much” is to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who have elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery. To say that “society” should decide how much it values various goods and services is to say that individual decisions on these matters should be superseded by collective decisions made by political surrogates. But to say this openly would require some persuasive reasons why collective decisions are better than individual decisions and why third parties are better judges than those who are making their own trade-offs at their own expense.

Again, no one would seriously entertain such an arrogant and presumptuous goal, if presented openly, plainly, and honestly. They may, however, be led in that direction if the anointed are able to slip undetected back and forth between one definition of “distribution” and another, as the exigencies of the argument require.